hard drive lost 6 gigs!

[Servanya]

Ok, here's a weird one. I recently installed visual studio .NET on my laptop. It took up 2 gigs, so I decided that I wanted to reformat and make my partitions for windows a little different. Actually, before that....let me explain. I have a 12 gig HD in my laptop. I had 9 gigs for linux, and 3 for windows. I decided that I wanted to use my linux partition's space to install VS .NET, so I went into the winXP disk manager and created an NTFS out of my linux partition. My 9 gigs of linux had 3 gigs for the root directory.....so in the XP disk manager, I just reformatted and used that 3 gigs for NTFS. Everything worked fine, and I installed VS .NET, then I realized that I have made it so I can't boot linux, but I have the /home and swap partitions still defined on my harddrive (basically, I was wasting 6 gigs).

So, I went back to the disk manager, but windows couldn't detect the left over space. Weird. Ok, I want just linux now. So, I fdisk with a 98 boot disk....and guess what? It too thinks I only have 5.7gigs of space. Ok, no problem (I thought it was just because fdisk can't see linux partitions). So, I download a low-level formatting utility and let it run. When I boot back up, and try to install linux, it only sees 5.7 gigs on hda!!!!! WTF? arghhh!

Interestingly enough...with my new install of linux, my partitions are labeled:
hda1 /..........4gig
hda5 swap...1.3 gig
hda6 home...400 MB

what happened to hda2, 3, and 4??
I thought a low level format would fix it.
Any ideas on how to recover that?

 

[Tanner]

have you tried spinrite5.0 ?

GL!

 

[Servanya]

no.
and, I don't even have windows installed right now.

 

[Tanner]

you don't need windBloZ to get it...if you're on a PC replying to this you can @ least "order" or obtain by other means a copy of spinrite5.0

GL d00d!

 

[stirling]

Try something that works at a lower level than a linux gui install.
What first comes to mind is an openbsd install boot disk.
Run fdisk from that (any *nix fdisk, really), and see what it says.

 

[wjsulliv]

Ok I had a similar problem.

In my case I set up my laptop to have a primary partition of 7 GB, and an extended partition of 2.5 GB using fdisk. I installed Windows on the 7 GB section, and then I installed linux on the 2.5 GB section. During Linux install I cut the 2.5 GB into a swap and a root. Later I decided I could run Windows on only 6GB, and figured I could use fdisk again to resize the partitions and start over from scratch. But fdisk couldn't see the linux partition(s). It was because they were set up using the linux install program and some of them were running ext2. So I reran the linux install program and changed the linux sections back into a single 2.5 GB partition and using the install program reformated it as a fat32 partition.

Simply summed up, when you use a linux distro install program to size and format linux partitions (anything formated ext2 like /root or /home or /usr), they are no longer able to be read by a standard Win 98 (or what ever) boot disk.

How to fix this...
Put you linux distro install disk back into the drive and reboot it.
Start running the install program.
When it asks your about partitions and formating, delete what ever was setup for linux and reformat/partition it as a single fat32 partition, like it was before you installed linux the first time.
After formating is complete, reboot using your Win 98 boot disk and you can again use fdisk.

 

[Servanya]

ok, what if the missing space doesn't show up in the linux install? That is what i was talking about.
I'll try it with freebsd tonight.....

....what about the low-level format? that should have fixed all this!

 

[Servanya]

another low-level format, and I used freebsd install - it doesn't see the rest of my HD.
So frustrating..

I almost considered spinrite, but it costs $89, and I couldn't find it in any "alternative" sources.