Burn bridges, regain drive space
One of the first things I did with my new Windows PC from Best Buy was to torch the OS and install a clean copy of Vista Ultimate. The fact it came preloaded with the google toolbar, and various demo installations just freaked me out. If you have a retail copy of Windows, I’d say round up your drivers and do the same.
Anyways the whole reinstallation deal lead to an observation of mine - I had a 20 gig partition that the Windows installer could not get at, nor could the Computer Management control panel (Disk Management snap-in)
20 gigs on a 750gig hard drive isn’t really a whole lot - but it’s the principle!
So before you embark down this road I’ll give you my usual disclaimer of proceed at your own risk. Back your stuff up! Also, I have a legit copy of Vista Ultimate to fall back on if I really screw crap up. (Not to mention all the Linux utilities and bootloaders) Ok now that all that’s out of the way, let’s get down to business.
1. Go to start, run, type “cmd” to get to the command line. (Do this as a system admin)
2. type diskpart, press enter
3. now you should be in the diskpart utility, you’ll see a special diskpart promp. At it, type rescan and press enter.
4. type list disk and press enter. You should be looking at a list of the drives installed in your machine.
5. now type “select disk x” where x is the number corresponding to the disk with the locked oem partition. e.g. “select disk 0″ press enter.
6. if you type “list partition” you can see the partitions on this drive. you should see in this list the locked oem partition
7. now we need to select that partition. type “select partition x” where x is the locked oem partition
8. this is it, once you’ve selected the disk and restore partition you can type “delete partition override” to blow it away.
9.now, exit out of the terminal window and go into the control panels (classic view), administrative tools
10. in administrative tools you should see computer management, inside that is disk management
11. in disk management you can easily right-click the newly freed up partition, format, and bring up as usable space in your system.
OTHER IDEAS
If you’re hurting for space and don’t want to do a reinstall, you could relocate your swap file to this partition if it’s big enough. This will free up space on your primary drive for more programs and whatnot. Alternatively you could use partition magic and try and merge the partitions together. Or, if you have a copy of Windows, you can drop both partitions within the Windows installer and install a clean copy of Windows on the one, big, partition.
Happy Hacking.