Hard drive not showing up

Greetings, here is the situation:

I was running Windows 8 and decided to move up to Windows 10. I went ahead and formatted the partitions on my SSD—standard procedure—but I left the hard drive untouched. Once the Windows 10 installation wrapped up, I checked "Devices and Drives," and there it was: that hard drive partition showing up alongside the others, but flagged as System Reserved and claiming 395/465 GB of space—even though the drive is actually empty.
After what I assume were a few restarts—though why anyone would bother with such repetitive cycles is beyond me—it seems the System Reserved partition, sitting there at about 350 MB, has appeared out of nowhere. Meanwhile, those other 465 MB partitions? They’ve vanished.



Does anyone have any actual suggestions on how to proceed? I’ve gone ahead and downloaded EaseUS Partition Master, and while it’s sitting right here in front of me—staring back—I’m still at a loss as to what the next move should be. Here is the current view:



Any assistance would be greatly appreciated—thanks!

Type "disk management" into your Windows search bar and see if that partition shows up there, along with whatever status it's displaying.

Otherwise IMO, you probably shouldn't have partitioned a 120GB SSD like that; it's just too small, especially when you're carving out space for the OS.

A colleague provided an answer over on the other thread—all I had to do was go into Disk Management and assign it a free drive letter 😁 😵
Thanks to you as well, regardless 👍

Regarding this SSD situation—I picked up one that, if my memory serves me right, had Windows 7 installed on one partition and Windows 8 on another. Is there any way I can actually merge them together now?

It’s doable, though I can't say for certain how Windows will handle things or what might happen to the files on your other partition. Honestly, I don't recall ever performing this kind of operation while partitions were already populated. Regardless, you should always back up anything important on those drives just to be safe.

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It isn't because the partitions are full—I am well aware that's usually a non-issue. It's just that the link you shared claims this Microsoft tool can handle it without any data loss, so I might as well give it a shot. Thanks for the lead.