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Old September 15th 07, 10:02 AM posted to microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices
sebbelcher
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Posts: 24
Default Cannot see part of a partitioned drive

Use the Disk Management console, which you will find under Control
Panel-Administrative Tools-Computer Management.

This will show your drives as the physical devices they are, you should see
the partitions in the graphical representation of the disk. your disk will
probably be divided into three sections, two large partitions and the small
amount of unallocated space at the end of the drive.

What's wrong could be one of two things, either the 'missing' partition has
been formatted correctly and has simply lost its drive letter, or it hasn't
been formatted at all. If the former is true, both large partitions will
have blue bars above them and say NTFS in the box, if this is the case,
simply right-click on the missing partition and click "Change Drive Letter"
or "Assign Drive Letter" (I can't remember exactly how it appears).

If the latter is true, then the missing partition will probably show up with
a black bar and 'RAW' in the box. In this case you need to format the
partition, you will then be able to assign a drive letter. To format, right
click and select format, then go through the options, defaults should be
fine, make sure NTFS is selected. Assign the drive letter as above.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The step above will destroy any data that was on that
partition, if you had previously used the partition to store data and it has
since stopped working and is showing up as 'RAW' then that would indicated
disk corruption, you should seek the advice of a specialist or use a recovery
tool such as Partition Doctor to proceed.

Hope this helps.
Seb.


"Bazzer" wrote:

My laptop has Vista Home Premium and came with a 100GB HDD partitioned to two
drives. The drives were to be reassigned new letters, but accidentally only
one partition was assigned a letter. The other drives letter was cleared but
a new letter not assigned. Now "Computer" only sees the drive to which the
letter was assigned.

I cannot use restore as there have been a number of updates before this was
discovered and a restore point prior to this event isn't available.

Any suggestions please?