Windows Vista Volume Size Contradiction
 

Hi Folks.

I have a small problem with my new HP dv6700t laptop. I have had the unit for about two weeks now, and I love it, but that is not the point.

I am getting two different sizes for my only partition on the disk, my Windows partition. It started when I chose to remove the HP Recovery partition, (after creating the recovery discs) to free up 11GB to add to the 100GB windows partition. I formatted the recovery partition (using the NTFS file system) from within windows vista. I then ran a defrag, a disk check, then booted into knoppix 5.1.1 and ran qtparted. I deleted the now blank recovery partition and extended the windows partition into the new space, and saved the changes. When qtparted was finished, it indicated a partition size of 111.79GB. Gparted said the same thing. I restarted and fired up vista, which booted normally. Once logged in, windows was showing a total capacity of 100GB while Disk Management indicated 111.79GB.

Why is this? Will I still be able to use and access the whole 111GBs regardless of what windows says? What can be done to solve the problem?

P.S. I wish I had known about HP's option to remove the recovery partition with their Recovery Manager BEFORE I used qtparted and knoppix...

Back up your data and reinstall from the factory disks.

Apparently Vista does not like how you reformatted and repartitioned the drive.

So if that 11 Gigs is that important to you then you have to reinstall and remove it the way they want you to.

...Heresy!

You could be seeing a difference between a binary 1GB and a decimal 1GB. Although that would account for only 7GB out of 100.

AFAIK, using vista, you should let vista extend the partition. I have a new laptop with vista, and my gripe is that Vista is too greedy for disk space. It only let me free up 80GB for Linux.

I think that the bottom line is that "the extend-partition did not work." The disk-space allocation structures were not extended to account for the enlarged partition.

Well, you need a full-backup anyway...

Use Microsoft's (very excellent!) backup tool to archive the drive. Then reformat it and reload.

I also suggest using the full backup tool, but it exists only in Vista Ultimate and Business editions I believe, not in the home editions.