Missing part of hardrive.... Help me please

macro12

New Member
Hi, I have windows Vista installed on my hard drive from which I previously made a partition. 186GB are on primary drive, and the rest is missing out of 320GBs...

I made a partition from which i tried to install windows xp but then ended up repairing my drive to windows vista ...

Any ideas how to make my lost partition re-appear? I have ubuntu on a cd to boot from it, which is what i used to make partitions. In case you have an idea using ubuntu its always available.

Help me please, im running out of space and need that missing partition
 
If you used the non MS compatible version of GParted or Qparted found on the ubuntu disk Windows won't see the VFat partition created. Plus a partition needs to be formatted before Windows will assign a logical drive letter to it when ready for use.

Even a non formatted NTFS type partition would still be invisible to Windows except for the Disk Management tool. If you had the option for NTFS and not VFat seen when creating the second partition look in the DM there. If not seen then you will need to delete that to see a new NTFS partition primary if dual booting or extended.

You have two options there. first deleting the second partition by way of the drive tool on the ubuntu disk or downloading and burning the iso image for the platform independent version of GParted to see that done. From there you can easily use the DM in Vista to create and format a new storage partition(primary or extended) or simply use GParted for that as well.

With the Linux partition removed you can also expand the current primary by the resize option now seen in Vista's DM or again use GParted for that as well with the resize option that offers.

The 0.3.3.0 release or slower 0.3.2.0 version is found about half way down the page at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828

Being familiar with a Linux drive tool you will be able to easily follow the documentation for the live for cd version at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/generalities/gparted.htm
 
I fixed it, you did help. The problem was that I had a partition of 112Gb which had an extended fat partition that most likely was from installing windows xp... when i deleted that extended partition i was able to format the rest of the partition.

Once i could, i deleted the whole partition and then from the unallocated space i created the ntfs partition again.

Thanks so much!!
 
Keep those links for reference since GParted does a great job for a free tool! Being that the second was never formatted it wouldn't become a logical drive. Plus Vista is not backward compatible to Fat like XP is. GParted will create partitions while you still need to see them formatted regardless of the type(primary-extended) or the OS platform.
 
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