My neighbor asked me to help him with a problem. He has an older pc and is having an issue with his hard drive. He is running windows 98se his H drive is 4g, he has attempted to partition the H drivein 2 parts to fat 32. He ow only has 2g on h drive and the other half does not show up anywhere, even in f disk. I suggested to simply re formatt and I woudl think this would recover the other 2 gigs, but he does not want to loose some things. My knowledge is limited so I am sure many more options are out there, but I was wondering if anybody could give any. TY

Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif

Do you know what he used to partition the drive? He may need to use the same program to retrieve the missing section.

I would also probably want to zero fill the drive and start over. He could back up what he has first and go from there. He can also download and run the utilities from the drive manufacturer to try to see if he can recover the lost partition.

Thnx, I am not sure what he used other than f disking and then going from there, have attempted to go back in and zero out, got the info from this site, still nothing showed up other than the 2G

At this point you would probably need the manufacturer's utilities to do a zero fill and find that other partition. You could also try a partitioning program like Ranish (which I believe is available for free on the web), but it might not work because the original problem wasn't caused by it.

I will try that, and thanks. Or I might suggest that he just scrap the idea of saving a few things and start from sratch.

Depending on the rest of his hardware and finances, it may be worthwhile to suggest scrapping the whole drive and getting a bigger one. You can find hard drives these days for less than $1/gig and 80gig seems to be the point where the price begins to really drop. It would certainly give him a lot more room to play than a 4 gig. On the other hand, if he has a 4 gig now, it is quite possible that his computer would have a lot of trouble handling anything over 8.4 gigs.

Yes it is an Old Compaq, pre HP.

Actually you can in stall larger (40+gb) on these older computers with small drives. I've installed 40gb drive on computers that had very small (1.9gb) drive. The Maxtor drive comes with a software that if you have a BIOS capacity limitation MaxBlast Plus II will load the EZ-Drive BIOS extension (EZ-BIOS) software.

Using "large" drives on older mobos can result in a total failure to boot; check the product literature or bios to find out in advance, since it may be that you won't even be able to boot from a floppy after you attach such drives to an IDE cable.

Compaqs are highly proprietary and like to do things in their own unique way. Be cautious about how you customise or even format their partitions. Which specific Compaq model is involved here.

Fdisk as a partition manager is very limited and best used on a new hdd (not running on a Compaq). Ranish (free) and Partition Magic are very much better utilities. I would recommend only using a recent version of PM to "play with" partitions that have data on them. Even then always backup important data before running any partition utility.

It will take a 3rd-party partition manager to determine whether the missing space is just unallocated or hidden or of a non-fat format without compromising what remains on the 2gig.

Ranish partition manager (http://www.ranish.com/part)
PowerQuest Partition Magic (http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/)

I haven't used Ranish yet, I always use Partition Magic for all my partitioning and it is indeed a very good, easy to use, hard-to-screw-your-hd-up-program. I have little doubt it will find that lost hdd-space and will be able to "rescue" it without the need for formatting.

Thanks for the info, not for him but I am going to check out the ranish for myself. I found that all he really needed to save was his e mail crap, omg. I think that my assistance will no longer be available to him, thanx again for the info