[Gllug] Recovering disk space

[John Winters]

John G Walker wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 23:52:59 +0530 "chanka perera"
> <chanka.perera at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> use GNU tools : http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ and make sure next time
>> before anything first start backup your valuable data.
>>
> 
> Thanks for the reference, but it's not clear to me what this does. As
> I said, no data was lost, since I don't mess around with PCs that
> contain data.  What I want is my disk space back.

I missed the start of this thread but I've nipped over to the GLLUG 
archive page and caught up.

At the risk of getting shouted at - the way you ask the question 
indicates a fundamental misconception about what's going on.  All your 
disk space is still there.  It would appear that your question is 
really, "How do I delete all the existing partitions and start again?" 
The simple answer to this is, "Use any sane partitioning tool which you 
like."  The only caveat here is that some Microsoft versions of FDISK 
used to be brain-damaged in this area.  (They may still be brain-damaged 
- I haven't tried lately.)  They would see a non-Microsoft partition and 
try to pretend to themselves that it wasn't there.  If you asked to 
delete the partition they would say, "Nope, no partition there" and if 
you asked to use the space for something else they would say, "Can't - 
there's a partition there."  This was a bug in the Microsoft FDISK, pure 
and simple, but it has caused an awful lot of grief and misconceptions.

>> use gnu tools : http://www.sysresccd.org/
> 
> This looks more useful, thanks. 
> 
> But I'd still like to know if reinstalling XP will sort out my problem
> by itself. I'm going to reinstall it, since this is going to be my
> backup Windows PC (for those occasions when I absolutely *have* to use
> it), so, if my disk space returns as a side-effect then this minimises
> my effort. But I was under the impression that XP would just accept
> what it found in the way of partitions, and the documentation doesn't
> tell me flip about it either way,

Fella et vide.  There may be an option in the XP installation to say, 
"Use whole disk", in which case choose it.  If there isn't then come 
back out and use any other partitioning tool to delete your existing 
partitions.  Then re-start the Microsoft installer and it will create 
one large partition for XP.

HTH
John
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