Hi !

I recently bought a Compaq Presario B1011 laptop with Windows XP Home Edition pre- installed. I want to use this machine with both Windows and Linux, so I installed SuSE 9.0. Everything went smoothly, except for some trouble with graphics and sound card and the win modem . However, during the installation, yast told me that the partition used for SuSE could only be 4 GB or smaller, and that I should defragment my Windows partition. I continued with the installation, everything fine so far.
Yesterday, I used the yast partition manager to reduce the Win XP NTFS partition in order to create another LINUX partition. Worked without a glitch, according to yast, my NTFS partition now has 26 GB, while my two other partitions now have 11 GB between them.
However, after booting to Windows XP, I noticed, that, according to Windows, the NTFS partition only has 20 GB. Using df under SUSE and Knoppix shows the same, though the yast partition manager insists that I have 26 GB for Windows.

Where have these 6 GB gone, and how can I get them back (prefereably without re- installing everything !)

Thanks,

KhymMahn

Someone told me that the 6Gb belongs to the XP restore facility, sorry I can't be more exact but I'm running XP and SUSE 9.0 and am also 'missing' approx 6 Gb.

hmm... i had Mandrake do all of my partitioning, and i havent noticed anything odd (I installed mandrake, then SuSE)

If it is System Restore eating the 6GB, you can turn it off by right clicking "My Computer" > Properties > System Restore and then checking "Turn of System Restore on all Drives".

However, whether you want to do this depends on how often you screw up. At the very least you can reduce the diskspace used to a more sensible level.

obRant about System Restore "backing up" viruses.

edit: Did you actually get the Windows Home CD and a laptop drivers CD or have they nicked part of your hard drive to keep a "restore image" of WinXP rather than giving you the disks? This is standard weasel practise w/ most laptop vendors.

Thanks guys, I have figured it out for myself by now. Though I think 6GB for a system restore is a bit excessive, isn´t it ?
@Frogman : You´re right, I only got the recovery CD. I checked the notebook of a friend who doesn´t even have LINUX installed, and his drive is also missing approximately 6GB.
The question is now : since I have a legitimate WinXP Professional CD around here, do I reinstall the entire system ?