Not sure where to start. I have windows xp on a 10gb hard drive from an old computer. I made this drive the slave on my newer pc where i have linux on a 60gb drive. I made the 10gig win drive the slave only to find out that windows only likes to be on the primary disk (surprise!). I tried the trick of trying to make the windows drive look like the primary but no success. So i changed the drives such that the 10gig win drive was the primary and the 60 gig linux drive was the slave. This worked and windows booted up. Since it came from a different pc there were tons of issues starting win. So i reinstalled win. I ened up reinstalling win 3 times for various reasons. Each time i did so, the size of my hard drive shrunk. Now when i fdsik the drive it shows no partitions (2gig free space) and a total capacity of 2gig. Where did the other 8gig go? If i try to install any of my linux distros on this drive it also shows as total capacity of 2gig and 2 gig free. Can anyone help me recover this space so i can claim it for my linux distro?

hi there,

did you try formatting the disk?

does your linux system support ntfs or is your windows a fat32 partition?

maybe try bootable knoppix, gives lots of info and locates all your partitions on harddrive.

good luck,

sjoerdvvu

I tried formatting by using the windows xp cd recovery tools. Still only see 2gig. Is there another formatting tool that will wipe the drive from beginning to end? Are there any portions of the hard drive that would normally be hidden to fdisk? And if so, is it possible that the missing space is buried there?
Thanks.

Some distros do not come with NTFS support out of the box, it needs to be added, this might be why it doesn't show the 8gig, i dont remember seeing NTFS as an option when partitioning with fdisk. So maybe your partition with windows on is NTFS and fdisk doesn't recognise (read, ignores) it. if you boot into windows how big does it say it is??

I laugh at this post because a user installed XP and used a DOS floppy (with fdisk) to interrogate the disk. Of course DOS reports 2Gb because DOS is short-sighted and can't see a distance beyond 2Gb.

FAT16 DOS can only address 2Gb of space and if that is what was used to format the disk then it is only natural that the partition cannot exceed 2Gb.

The last time i booted into win it said 2+gig. Is there a partition tool that can view ntfs?
Thank you.

I used the recovery utilities on the win xp install cd. It's actually called diskpart. Looks the same as fdisk. Is there anything about diskpart that would cause it not to show some of the space?

If you used DOS fdisk to format it then the partition can only be 2Gb.

Why don't you run a Linux Live CD, do a fdisk -l and all will be revealed?

It will tell you the total disk size, every partition you have, its partition type and the size. The exact locations of each partition are also shown.

How about giving it a try?

just check out some linux distro's, you have them bootable as well,

knoppix 3.9 (from cd)
suse
mandrake
lots more

I know they all can handle ntfs ( at least reading, but some of them don't fully support ntfs, like formatting)

there must be lots of windows tools on the net as well!

sjoerdvvu

In answering to your original problem you can have your XP in a slave position if you re-map the two disks in Grub using these two statement in /boot/grub/menu.lst

map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)

XP bought it every time!

That is what I did to have 2 DOS, a Win3x, a Win9x, a Win2k and XP in a company of quite a few Linux and BSD in one box. Grub has "hide" (also unhide)statement to hide any DOS/Windows partition in front of the partition to be booted. That satisfied M$ system's fantasy of being in the first primary of the first bootable disk!

If you haven't got Grub install one or load a distro that has it. Grub is available in DOS7 and Solaris now.

Thanks all. I have a copy of DSL that I'll try tonight.

I don't know what else to do. I'm typing this from my live cd copy of DSL. I tried fdisk in DSL and it said it could not read hda and hdb. I also tried cfdisk and i got a fatal error. I tried 2 other linux distros and both said the drive is 2 gig. The drive is definitely 10gig. I tried the windows xp recovery tools. Is it possible that in hte process of all the partitioning and installation of OSs that I did permanent damage to the hard drive?

list the content of

fdisk-l

here. The only possibility I can think of is your disk may have been messed up by the BIOS causing the cylinder/head/sector to have incorrect entries. Some programs are can also cause such mishaps.

Usually Linux sees modern disk with 63 sectors and 255 heads.

Is there any way to get a hard drive back to its original state?