I think I "lost" 20 GB

[Bouchacha]

I think I "lost" 20 GB (partition help)

Hello everybody

I was attempting to install win2k on my Maxtor 160GB harddrive but the first installation just crashed. No problem, I thought, I'll just do it again. The only problem is that I am very picky about my partitions and had to make sure that all of them are named properly (drive letter). Well after messing around with it for a while I decide to just give up and delete everything (after backing up of course). It was then that I noticed that my harddrive went from 156GB to now only 132GB. I am positive of this because prior to deleting everything I had partiton C at 80GB, partition D at 10GB and partition F at 66GB. When I try to reconstruct my partitions, I am left with only 42 GB for partition F. When looking through it on another computer using Disk Management, it tells me that my drive has 128GB unallocated space and nothing else. Is there anything that could've happened where my harddrive could suddenly lose 20GB just like that? Thank you guys for your help in advance.

 

[Didou]

Enable large drive support aka 48-bit LBA.

 

[Bouchacha]

Addendum

thank you! that was exactly the problem. I fixed that all right. But now I have another problem

The unallocated portion on the right only appeared after I had LBA enabled. The problem is though, the Free space portion seems linked to Drive D: (as seen with the green borders). If i want to use up the rest of my harddrive, I have to make two seperate partitions (one for the free space and the other in unallocated). Is there anyway to get around that? Thanks for your help!

 

[Bouchacha]

bump

please help

 

[Didou]

You're going to have to edit the extended partition & it is not possible to do so from Windows unless you have an application such as partition magic.

 

[Bouchacha]

I've always had bad experiences with parition magic. Is this a dangerous operation?

 

[Samstoned]

should not be to hard
as your dealing with unused space plus PM gives you a chance to back out
even then you can take away space from any partition and make nother one
after you decide the way you want the partitions top look it shows you just like the image you showed us this does not mean that the drives have been changed.
I have played with this program repeatedly moving partitions all around
and then putting them back all that I noticed was W2K found new devices
you may need to defrag HDD's
if you still feel unsure get yerslf a spare HDD and play round with it