[Gllug] Recovering disk space

[John G Walker]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:57:06 +0000 John Winters <john at sinodun.org.uk>
wrote:


> 
> 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."  

No misconception, just a different way of putting it. As I see it, the
disk space is there, but I haven't got it because the partitions have
got corrupted and some of the hard disk is now invisible. As you say,
if I can delete the partitioning the disk space will reappear (ie I'll
get it back).


>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.

Thanks for the warning.

> 
> 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.

There isn't such an option, which why I queried the idea that just
reinstalling XP would solve the problem.

I've received a whole load of suggestions, so I'll start working my way
through them in the most sensible order as soon as I can. Thanks to
everyone who's helped,


-- 
 All the best,
 John
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