I have a western digital wd2000bb 200gb drive. I inadvertantly deleted the partition table/entry through windows installer, which is fine we rewrote the table, and plugged it in through a usb drive and i saw everything which is cool.

I got a new machine and installed windows xp sp-2, and plugged the drive in. Both the bios and windows detect the drive as 137gb. Which indicateds lack of 48-bit lba support. But sp-2 supports it, and while I cant find anything to prove it i assume my gigabyte ga-k8vm800m rev 2 supports it being a week old.

So i plug the drive into a linux box and find i have a host protected area consuming the rest of the drive.

Has windows done this? The partition tables have been deleted again, and fdisk/cfdisk can only see the 137gb.

A complete format may help me here, but I have 60gb of data on this disk that is not backed-up.

Any suggestions how to get it back to just one 200gb partition, with no HPA without losing my data??