RELATED: Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Management If they’re in Time Machine backup format and you don’t have access to a Mac, you can restore Time Machine backups on Windows. If you have any important files on the drive, be sure you have copies of them before you continue.
You can’t simply remove the 200 MB partition and leave any other partitions alone - you’ll be wiping the drive’s contents and starting afresh with a new partition table. This process will actually wipe the entire external drive. The 200 MB partition at the beginning of the drive will stubbornly refuse to be deleted, and you’ll have to go beyond the Disk Management tool to delete it.
The one time when you’ll want to do this is when you were previously using a drive for Time Machine backups, but you’re done with that and want to use it for something else.
