I have recently come to possess a 60GB hard drive from my daughter’s laptop (long story, I'll post it sometime). I installed it in a USB enclosure and when I popped it in, 2 drives came up, a 5GB "recovery" drive and the remaining portion of the drive.

In Computer management, it shows 2 partitions, how can I delete the partition and use the entire drive? I tried the "Extend volume Wizard" in Vista but receive an "Operation is not supported by the object" error. Typical M$ double-speak.

Any help tossed my way would be appreciated.

If you can boot to a CD, you should be able to use a disk wiping utility to wipe the drive...but, you may need to use one that has USB drivers. Most Linux LiveCDs have G-parted or Qt-Parted...GUIs for the command line parted (partition editor) that should allow you to remove/create new partitions.

What I usually do if you have floopy drive is to go and download a boot disk for Win98SE or WinME (if you do web search for boot disk, it should be fairly easy to find) and use FDISK to delete the partition and create new partition. Make sure you enable large disk support when FDISK prompts you and select option #5 (I think) to select the correct hard drive that you want to work with before you delete or create any new partition...

I am not sure if Vista uses NTFS or not, but if you don't mind FAT32 file system, you can use the FORMAT command to format new partition. If Vista can format full 60GB, then use Vista to format. If it's similar to Win2K or XP, it should ask you if you want to format in FAT32 or NTFS file system.

You should normally be able to delete the partitions in Vista's Disk Management by Right-Clicking on the Partition and choosing Delete Volume. Does this not work on your machine? If not then I would agree that wiping the drive is the next best way to go. Once wiped/zeroed (the hard drive makers mostly provide such utilities on their websites) Vista's Disk Management should be able to initialize (partition and format) the drive for you.

A DOS boot floppy will not function on a USB drive unless somehow USB drivers have been installed and enabled to work from it on the machine in question.

The TBU utilities (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm) can also "see" USB drives and their BootIt and CopyWipe should work OK from a boot floppy or a boot CD if needed. If you want GParted on a Linux Live CD that isn't enormous then the standalone GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) is the best way to go.