Partition Problems under windows XP with PartitionExpert

[SamSharp99]

Good evening,
I have a laptop with a 20Gb Hard-drive and used to use 5Gb of that space for fiddling with various linux distros. I needed to delete the partition as it was no longer needed anymore. I went to partitionexpert to remove the partition, and as soon as I clicked the commit button, I got the blue screen of death after which my laptop rebooted.

When it booted up (after having done a fixmbr to remove the linux bootloader), the windows partition size was reporting to be 20Gb, but there was no extra free space, all the space I had freed up was gone!

Is there a way I can get this missing space back without formatting the whole drive?

Sam Sharp

 

[rvnguy]

I have a laptop with a 20Gb Hard-drive..and partition size was reporting to be 20Gb

What extra space are you looking for?

You removed the partition and now have all 20GB as a single partition from the looks of your post.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[SamSharp99]

My drive is 20Gb, I used 5gb of that for the linux distribution.

Now after my problem, PartitionExpert reports my windows partition to be 20gb, with 1.11gb free space. My computer reports the drive to be 15gb with 1.11 Gb, so I am missing 5Gb of usable space.

 

[rvnguy]

Well that is a different explanation.

I donot use 3rd party partitioning apps for just this reason.

Quick way to correct if you have the hardware....

Remove HD ans slave to another PC....set a drive on this pc (a slave drive) as blank... image the lap HD to this other drive...now on lap HD start fresh partition as single or? reformat it,,,check that it is correct...image the Lap HD back from the saved image.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[SamSharp99]

Hmm...Could i use a partition as the slave drive to image onto as I only have 1 HD that I could use for this and it is running my home pc.

What program would you recommend for imaging?

 

[rvnguy]

Drive mfg's have utils that work on their drives as the receiving device...for free. If you have 2 differing drive mfg's you will need utils from both one to image and one to image back.

Acronis True Image is a good app & not overly expensive as is Norton Ghost. I know that Acronis can be had on trial.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all