20 Gigs of HDD space missing (1 Viewer)

[Emmanuel]

Hey guys,

I have a very interesting question that I hope you can answer for me. I have a Dell XPS 410 with a 320 GB hard drive and back when I got it, I decided to format the computer and remove Vista since I hate the OS. The issue is that I was going to format once again to install a newer version of XP SP3 and noticed that my Hard drive is missing 20 gigs.

I looked at dell support and found that it is a hidden partition made by the vendor to enable restore. I can't restore since I formatted and also I can't use the remove utility they included with the machine because, like I said, I erased everything.

Is there a way to restore that partition with some other application? I can't find anything online that gives me a simple answer. I hope someome here has an answer.

Best Regards,

WebManny.com

 

[Minkey]

I looked at dell support and found that it is a hidden partition made by the vendor to enable restore. I can't restore since I formatted and also I can't use the remove utility they included with the machine because, like I said, I erased everything.

Before you do this I'd double check your warranty I know some manufacturers will insist this should not be deleted to honer the warranty but of course you may have already invalided it by removing Vista

But yes you can clicky it's for Vista but I think it should work with XP, another option which would be easier (but I can't guarantee it will work because I don't know if it will detect the hidden partition by default - though you can download the trial from the following link) is to use partition manager software clicky (one of the best). If you use partitions I can recommend this anyway, it cheap has much better tools than Windows and has a better defrag tool as well.

 

[Acused]

thanks for the above suggestion really worked for me

 

[Emmanuel]

Hey guys!

Thank you for your suggestion, but unfortunately I downloaded the software and tried all the steps given in the page and when it finished scanning it did not find the hidden partition. what could they have done in Dell to hide this so good and why? I decided to even pull out the hard drive and it does read 320 gigs. Any other suggestions?

Thanks again for you help so far.

WebManny.com

 

[sbenj69]

It's not missing 20Gig, that's how much space is used by the partition catalog (~7.5%) If you boot into BIOS, it should show you the total capacity of the HDD. On setup, it reports the size of the partition minus the index/catalog portion used up by the partition.

 

[boblarson]

And here's basically what sbenj69 said, slightly reworded:
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/1594

The larger the drive, the larger the disparity between what it is called and what it actually is.

 

[Grafixx01]

Do a google search for a program called "MiniPE", you should get like a 300+mb CD that you can download. On there is a multitude of programs that you can use. I use the CD all the time to wipe and reload my HDDs in my many machines and don't have any issues with a restore.

However, even when you reloaded XP onto the system, when you see the "Install on drive" screen, you should have seen how large the drive was. When I did my XPS410 (250gig) it only showed like 238+ available so its got the index portion as stated above.

 

[sbenj69]

heh, well, it's a combonation of what I stated and Bob stated

Here is another article: http://www.dabs.com/Article.aspx?NavigationKey=4294967285+4294966792+4294967282&ArticleID=152

 

[Emmanuel]

Thanks guys. I agree with what you have said here and I guess there isn't much we can do about it. Have a great one.