Find my Partition!

[CHayes1126]

Ok a while back I had tried to reformat and reinstall windows on my machine. I had used about 20 gigs of my 120 gig hard drive. I reinstalled windows but when I went to my computer to see how much space I had, it was showing about 100 gigs. Somehow I partitioned by hard drive and my computer will not let me view what is on the 20 gigs that seems to be gone. Does anyone know how I can recover that lost 20 gigs?

[HyperTF]

You said in your first sentence that you had tried to reformat. Did you reformat... sorry, I am a little confused...

What Operating System are you using?

To try to answer, there are file recovery tools which can find files which have been formatted over, some are free to download but I have not really had to use them before, but I know people who have and say they are great.

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Edit: when you go into Computer Management -> Disk Management (if you have it) can you see anything obscure? It should show you a layout of your Hard Drive, partition sizes and free space etc! what does it say?

[CHayes1126]

well im not real sure if it formated or not, I think it just created a partition and installed windows on that partition blocking my 20 gigs on a seperate partition somehow. I have windows XP. I have heard of some of the programs but im not real sure on which one would allow me to be able to do what I need to do. I dont even know what I did lol!

[CHayes1126]

im not sure where this computer managment is you speak of. I went into system info and looked under drives. Now here is the thing it shows my hard drive as having only one partition with a 93.16GB Size. Man I dont know what the heck I did to this thing!

[HyperTF]

Ok no worries go to

Start -> Control Panel -> Performance and maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> open Computer Management -> click on Disk Management

You should get something like the following (this is what I just screen grabbed)

[CHayes1126]

Ok I found it, It does not say anything it shouldnt, it says: healthy with a capacity of 93.13GB no other partitions.

[HyperTF]

Ok, ironically it sounds like you might need to delete all partitions, repartition and format the drive and start over, but this does not solve your lost files problem... Unless someone else can suggest a tried and trusted file recovery tool all I can offer you is this link to a product a friend swears by

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

But I am not sure that it is free... there are free ones and I have to say it is at your own risk, but I will be downloading one now to trial it anyway. Hope someone else knows of handy tools... before you do anymore hard drive changes I would back up any files you have now that you want to keep... just remember the more moving and deleting of files and applications now the harder those files might be to recover... I will be downloading this and will check it out

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

[HyperTF]

Oh by the way, you will not actually ever see 120GB. It is a bit of a false figure, just for convenience sake... I cant remember the exact math at this moment but for a 160GB HDD it is really only 149GB. so as a rough guess your drive may only ever reflect 109GB being available. Can someone please remind me of the conversion? ...is it

total MB / 1024 (- 8?)

120,000 / 1024 = 117.19

117.19 - 8 = 109.19GB ????

[kilgoretrout]

The capacity is given correctly in bytes, here, 120 billion bytes. Divide that by 1024 three times to get successively kilobytes, megabytes, and finally gigabytes. Here it works out to about 112 GB.

[mrmister1]

When you formatted, did you ever choose how big to make the partition? Did you ever delete the old partition?

And as the others have said, the drive will never show up as what's stated.