Partitioning a Mac HD through Windows 7?

[nukedukem]

Hi I just used my old macbook hard drive in my newly built desktop. I'm going to use it as a storage drive. It was partitioned with bootcamp and a seperate OS X partition. Now when I put the drive in the desktop only the NTFS partition is showing so I can't format the drive as a whole?

Is there a way I can make the drive whole again as an NTFS partition?

I downloaded a program called HFS explorer but that didnt do the trick.

Maybe I can do this in DOS somehow?

Thanks for any ideas!

 

[Leeky]

Warning: The instructions below will completely remove the partition in question. Any data it contains will be lost in the process. So be sure you have a backup if you have stuff on there you need

You will be able to see the entire disk in the admin control panels' disk management tool. If you're using Windows 7, just click start and type disk management into it, then select create and format hard disk partitions. See below:



Then navigate to the disk in question, and you'll see the OS X partition. I've taken a screenshot of the application as well as the menu options for each partition in the image below:



You need to select the OS X partition, then right-click and select "delete volume" from the menu. This will delete the partition, but you'll also need to remove the partition you had for Windows previously if you want to use the disk with one single partition. Once both are deleted you can use the option "create simple partition" to make one single partition the entire size of the disk.

If you're using an older OS, the tool can be found in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. Using search in Windows 7 is just the shortcut to locate it faster.

Hope this helps.

 

[nukedukem]

Brilliant thanks a lot for your help worked great!

 

[Leeky]

No problem at all. Glad I could help.

 

[SNGX1275]

You need to select the OS X partition, then right-click and select "delete volume" from the menu. This will delete the partition, but you'll also need to remove the partition you had for Windows previously if you want to use the disk with one single partition. Once both are deleted you can use the option "create simple partition" to make one single partition the entire size of the disk.

If you delete the OS X partition, you could still use the remaining disk (in full) as one partition without deleting the existing Windows partition. You could just expand the current one into the free space by right clicking and choosing "extend volume" like in your 2nd screen shot. Except it wouldn't be greyed out because there would be unpartitioned space to extend into.

Not that it matters how it was done in this particular case, but there could be times where someone had stuff they wanted to keep on the Windows partition.

 

[Leeky]

Aye I considered that, but you can only do it when the free space is after the partition (to the right of the partition) you wish to extend. In the case of OS X, that would be first, and Windows 7 second, so that wouldn't be possible as the free space would be before the partition you wish to extend. Hence why I mentioned that both would need to be deleted in order to create one single partition.

If the partitions were the other way around that would have been possible, however.

 

[SNGX1275]

Ah, I thought maybe that was the case. Kind of a shame that MS finally made some improvements to Disk Management in Vista and 7 but its still far behind something like gParted. I had also considered just making a new partition in the old one's spot, and merging, but remembered that Disk Management can't do that either.