# Lost 1/2 of My Hard Drive Space



## Tecmo SB Guy (Sep 28, 2007)

For anyone here who's a computer expert or anyone else for that matter, I have a situation I'd like to run by you guys and maybe somebody has an answer for this.

Anyways, I have a desktop. It has 2 partitions. Each partition has about 250 GB of space. 

The computer crashed and so I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system (it's Windows Vista. The desktop is about 6 years old).

When I did that, I only got 1 partition back. The other 250 GB partition disappeared. So I essentially lost half my hard drive space.

What do you guys think happened and do you guys think it's a hardware problem or software problem?

And how can I get that other partition back?


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

If you run diskmgmt.msc from the start menu, does it show up there without a drive letter assigned?


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## 4HiMarks (Jan 21, 2004)

Did you reformat the whole drive or just the system partition? How was it partitioned, in two primary partitions, or one primary containing two logical partitions? Was the 2nd partition encrypted?


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## Tecmo SB Guy (Sep 28, 2007)

dpeters11 said:


> If you run diskmgmt.msc from the start menu, does it show up there without a drive letter assigned?


Okay just ran it.

No it didn't show up there. Does that mean it's a hardware problem?



4HiMarks said:


> Did you reformat the whole drive or just the system partition?


The whole drive.



> How was it partitioned, in two primary partitions, or one primary containing two logical partitions?


Actually, it was originally 3 partitions. The 2 partitions with the available hard drive space and 1 small recovery partition. When I did the system recovery, the small recovery partition and 1 partition with all the programs and some available hard drive space showed up. The 3rd partition was gone.



> Was the 2nd partition encrypted?


No.


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

So you only see the 250gb? You aren't seeing the other in unallocated space, or anything?


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

need pictures:
- BIOS setup
- Disk Management


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## philtec (Sep 11, 2011)

Download this free partiton program and it might tell you what is going on:
http://www.extend-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html


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## Tecmo SB Guy (Sep 28, 2007)

dpeters11 said:


> So you only see the 250gb? You aren't seeing the other in unallocated space, or anything?


No.



P Smith said:


> need pictures:
> - BIOS setup
> - Disk Management


I uploaded the Disk Management. How do I see the BIOS setup?



philtec said:


> Download this free partiton program and it might tell you what is going on:
> http://www.extend-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html


Thanks, I'll try that.

There's a 3rd partition for the Recovery. I didn't mention it for simplicities sake.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

> How do I see the BIOS setup?


when booting press F10 button or Delete - check your PC manual.


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## RasputinAXP (Jan 23, 2008)

...that partition is definitely blown away. Partition Manager may be able to find it.


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## The Merg (Jun 24, 2007)

Check out EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition. You can resize and recover partitions with it. It's free and works very well.

- Merg


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## dmspen (Dec 1, 2006)

Here's an excerpt from Windows Secrets newsletter I get. This came in today. Note the use of EaseUS. This person was able to recover they're partition completely. Check it out as The MERG suggested!

Help found in Windows Secrets' archives
	Saturday, I wrote you of my external disk's problem with lost data. Yesterday, I was able to ascertain that the data space I had lost had been turned into unallocated disk space. This was, of course, even more disconcerting, but now I had a better search term available to me. I used it to search Windows Secrets and generate a series of articles. 
In one of Fred Langa's pieces, I found a pointer to a free disk partition recovery tool, EaseUS Partition Recovery. I downloaded and installed it and cranked it up. Its fast version produced no results, but its complete version, which took some 10 hours to finish, found my data storage partition. I was able to restore that partition with all of the desired data intact. It wasn't able to find my system backup partition, but I was able to convert the remaining unallocated space into a new partition into which I immediately poured a new system backup.
Bottom line is that my external disk problem has been resolved, thanks to Windows Secrets, Fred Langa, and EaseUS Partition Recovery. I still don't understand why the Acer box did what it did when I tried to store a copy of its recovery partition to my external drive, but I have decided to try to get around it using the Windows 8 version of the Windows 7 file backup, which seems to work exactly like the Windows 7 backup utility. Accept my sincere thanks. — Rick Ketchum


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## The Merg (Jun 24, 2007)

dmspen said:


> Here's an excerpt from Windows Secrets newsletter I get. This came in today. Note the use of EaseUS. This person was able to recover they're partition completely. Check it out as The MERG suggested!
> 
> Help found in Windows Secrets' archives
> 	Saturday, I wrote you of my external disk's problem with lost data. Yesterday, I was able to ascertain that the data space I had lost had been turned into unallocated disk space. This was, of course, even more disconcerting, but now I had a better search term available to me. I used it to search Windows Secrets and generate a series of articles.
> ...


Just to be clear... EASEUS has two products. Partition Master and Partition Recovery. Partition Recovery is great for the cases where a partition has been deleted and needs to be recovered. Partition Master is great for the cases where you want to adjust partition sizes, move them around, and add or delete partitions.

In the OP's case, it looks like he wants to create one large data partition instead of having two smaller ones. In that case, I would use the Partition Master application.

- Merg


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