Problem with Vista built-in partition tool

Well, first take a look here: http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x34/lakersgo/Untitled.jpg.

As you can see, the Vista Partition Tool correctly recognizes my 1.5GB external HD (F , but in "My Computer", Vista only recognizes 908GB of the volume. What happened is that I partitioned out the drive a few weeks ago, but the new partition was never recognized by the computer (for whatever reason) and now I don't need that particular partition but since it never shows up on the computer, there is no way for me to delete it. So...now I need your expertise, what do I need to do to reclaim the lost storage space? Formatting is not an option as I have saved files on it.

 

I use the free bootable partition wizard.

BEST FREE Partition Manager Software for Windows supports all 32-bit & 64 bit Windows No-server OS.

 

I think formating may be your ONLY option. You should just bite the bullet, move those files off to an external drive, burn them to DVD's or whatever. Then wipe the partition out and redo it. I doubt if any third party tool is going to help much (although worth a try of course).

The issue is the partition table appears to have a single large partition on the entire drive, yet the NTFS format seems so have only formated 900 gb of it. Something is amiss, and anything you do to try to "fix" it rather than just redoing it may come back to haunt you latter.

Gary

 

Well, it's my external backup drive, so I really don't want to format and lose all the data.

Not sure if it's the equivalent of partitioning, but I shrank the volume (I think that's how you do it with vista partition tool) to make room for the new partition, somehow it was never recognized.

 

I don't honestly think you have any choice. When a drive is this screwed up, anything you try to do is going to be the equivalent of a band aid. You might wind up losing data sometime down the road.

The only certain method of doing this is to copy the data off some where and wipe the drive and copy back on. It is obvious that the partition table thinks the drive is one size and the OS thinks the formated partition is some other size. If this were my only copy of critical data I would never trust some "repair" of this discrepancy.

Gary

 

Spot on...then you will be back here posting--all my data is gone because I didn't take Gary's advice and back up everything.

We will all laugh at you and call you names.

Best to avoid the public ridicule and shame and fix this problem right the first time.