Hidden Recovery Partition on HDD

My Toughbook still has the stock hard drive.

It shows up as 30 GB in windows even though it has a 40 GB drive stock.

Windows doesn't show any hidden partitions.
But there is an option for Erase HDD/Factory Recovery in the BIOS. Is this where the missing 10 GB went?

Can I create my own image to live there when I put another drive in?

 

Um... What tye of Toughbook is it? Model number?

 

Well you won't have the full 40 gigs regardless of whether or not there is a hidden partition - it will probably be in the mid thirties. But proportionally there shouldn't be ten gigs missing so you probably do have like a three or four gig hidden recovery partition. Do not erase your HD unless you want to loose all of the data and files you have. They do make programs to repartition your drive which would probably be a safer bet.

 

remember that you loose 7% when formatting... for example a 20GB drive will only be 18.6GB or a 40GB drive will only have 37.2GB... so that recovery partition would probably be around 6-7.2GB or so... so you would only gain at the most 7GB of storage.

Also, I don't ever remember a CF-30 coming stock with a 40GB drive, and i checked the configurator just to make sure I wasn't crazy... and they all come with 80GB drives and some with a 120GB drive.

You might wanna make sure that you didn't get ripped off, and make sure that that unit isn't stolen. If it would have been stolen and the computrace was on on the hard drive the only way to fix it would have been to replace the drive as you cannot get computrace off of it once its been activated.

 

DOH: Toughbook CF-29ETN26KM

It should be a 40 GB drive according to the BIOS.

XP lists it as a Hitachi HTS424040M9AT00

Also lists Disk 0 Basic 29.25 GB 100% used in one System partition. (w/ 88% free space) under Disk management.

 

I'm sorry, somehow I thought u were referring to a CF-30... stupid me lol and yeah 40GB's is standard on alot of the CF-29's.

Disc managment will only go via partition information (IE won't query the model itself for size info)

 

You might try a 3rd party app like Partition Magic to see if there's a non-windows recognized partition.

 

Download the Ultimate Boot CD ( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) ... ISO image, burn that to a CD, and on booting up on it, you get a bunch of different utilities from system burn-in to hard disk formatting and low-level work for partitioning. I've used this boot CD many a times to erase the HPA on IBM Thinkpads. And the price is right.

 

I find many of the utilities on the ultimatebootcd to be outdated or not NTFS friendly. I currently usually use the Knoppix LiveCD v5.1.1. This distro automatically loads into and runs from ram (a ramdrive). The partition utility is called QTparted.