Lost HDD Space

[juancpryor]

I have an 80Gb Toshiba hdd and up until recently I had three partitions:

1. 50 Gb primary partition for WinXP

2. Linux logical partition

3. 25 Gb extended linux partition for Fedora Core 6

I uninstalled FC6 and erased partitions 2 and 3 in order to give more space to the windows partition.

The OS (WinXP) won't recognize the space freed up when I deleted #2 and #3 partitions and resized #1. Both partition magic and gparted recognize the size of the partition as, roughly, 77 Gb, but WinXP just doesn't see the space and tells me the partition is only 50 Gb big.

This is what the diskmgmt.msc tool finds:

Volume: (C

Layout: Partition

Type: Basic

File System: NTFS

Status: Healthy (System)

Capacity: 54,99 GB

Free Space: 4,32 GB

% Free: 7%

Fault Tolerance: No

Overhead: 0%

And in the graphical lower half of the screen:

Disk 0

Basic

74,53GB

Online

And a long rectangle that states "(C 74,53 GB NTFS Healthy (System)" with diagonal lines across it, as if it was a unique partition (it is, actually).

Partition Magic 8.0 finds this:

DISK 1

Partition: Local Disk (C

Type: NTFS

Size: 76.316,6

Used: 51.878,7

Unused: 4.427,2

Status: Active

Pri/Log: Primary

So, as you can see, it really recognizes the same problem. It sees a 76GB partition but with 20GB lost space.

What can I do?

[Alan2273]

Welcome to the forum juancpryor.

When you erased partitions 2 & 3, did you go into disk management in XP and format the new single partition.

I had 3 operating systems across two hard drives, but took one of the two Linux operating systems off, I deleted the two partitions, merged into one, then I right clicked My computer, click Manage, click Disk Management, right click the partition, click Format, after it has been formatted it will be assigned a drive letter and you will have the missing space back.

If you have the GRUB or LiLo boot manager, I suggest you leave it as it is unless it is causing you problems.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Can you post a screen capture of the Partition Magic layout? I cannot quite understand without seeing the graphic layout.

[berlinbullet]

I am having the same exact problem. I ran a lost partition finder and it pulled up about 70 partitions that were lost, but most are just identical to the others in terms of size. I also found that I can't run another partition magic task because I get the error 1529 (at least I believe thats the error code off the top of my head). I'm almost out of ideas.. I might resort to ghosting the machine and just fdisk'ing the HDD and hoping that works...

Any more ideas out there?

[Scarecrow Man]

Have you tried using this tool? It might allow you to gain those lost partitions. But remember changing the Boot partition can cause your computer to not start.

http://www.ranish.com/part/

[juancpryor]

The thing is that I didn't merge the two linux partitions. I erased them and then allocated the unallocated space to the windows partition so....it's kind of different of what you did. Plus, the partition is, effectively, 75 Gb large but Windows only recognizes 50Gb of it eventhough it "sees" more.

I did it using gparted.

As for the posting of Partition Magic Screen, I'll post it tomorrow.

Thanks for the Grub advice, though, unfortunately it comes a little late. Gave me hell last week. Thanks anyway.

[berlinbullet]

Mine is a 75gb drive recognized the same way as yours as well. But the properties of my C drive show it as 55 (the 20gb linux partition I had before is 'missing' on that reallocation). I too used gparted to do the reformat/reallocation-merger. I recently ran Active Partition Recovery and it found appx. 75 lost partitions, but none of them are able to be recovered for some odd reason.. many look to be duplicates. Tonight I think I'm going to try reformatting the entire drive to see if that gets my the lost space back or not. With luck it might.

[berlinbullet]

Success!

I took the long route, but it was sure. If you want to take the time....

I used Norton Ghost to image my C: drive with windows on it. Then I formatted C: (and prayed a little). I booted up into Norton Ghost Recovery, put the image on (told it not to restore the logical disk signature), booted back into Windows (phew!) and voila.. My Computer says that I have a 75gb hard drive again.

It only took me about 2 hours round trip on this. Gave me a nice time frame to make a decent dinner.

Good luck if you choose another route!

[juancpryor]

Here are the screen captures of the Disk Management Tool in WinXp and the Disk Properties. Partition Magic sees something similar, if not the same, to the WinXP diskmgmnt so I won't post it.

As you can see, WinXP can see the space but it doesn't use it. Anyone knows why this happen?

P.S. Congrats on getting back your space. The thing is that I would really want to know why this happens and how to fix it instead of reformatting (which is probably what I'll end up doing anyway)....

[Scarecrow Man]

That is quite strange.

The only thing I can think of, is these partitions are still in use by something. You can either use fdisk to see if you can get the partitions back, and then use partition magic to merge them, or use TestDisk to recover the partitions.

[Alan2273]

It certainly is strange, I have never seen that before.

In the disk management program it shows 3 partitions under Overhead showing 0%, so it looks like scarecrow man has the right idea in saying something is still using these partitions.