Re: Help! Hidden partition taking up half my hard drive space!
- From: "Rod Speed" <rod.speed.aaa@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2006 07:11:13 +1000
slugbug <fuzzhead72@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We got our Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop recently, and one of the first
things I did was to try uninstalling all the junk. It still seemed
slow, so I downloaded all the drivers, located my Windows install
disk, and then went to work. The system shipped with a 60 GB hard
drive, so I expected to see about 55 GB of space available. Instead,
I see about 30.
After some further research, that appears to be due to the current
Dell approach of including Ghost with the system and using most
of that lost space as somewhere for Ghost to write images to.
Thats documented in the manual, P78
God knows whether it will still work now you
have molested your drive so comprehensively.
I'd try a Dell PC system restore, then try removing
that restore capability as documented in the manual.
First thing I tried was my trusty old Maxtor CD that shipped with one
of my drives. It has a utility for changing partition information.
(deleting, creating new, and low level formatting) This utility was
able to do a low level format, but it only seemed able to see half of
the drive.
Then I tried another utility from a Seagate CD, "Zero Fill". Zero
fill is supposed to write all zeroes to the entire hard drive. It
takes forever, but usually gets rid of everything on the drive. This
time, it took most of the day, and got stuck at about 50%.
I do remember that this thing shipped with "Norton Ghost", or at
least I saw it in the list of programs. I am guessing that this
program was used to create some sort of hidden partition, which was
used to back up the system and all the junk it had on it as shipped.
Of course, I already have a Windows install CD, and a backup of all
the drivers, so I really don't need this backup. What I really want
is to be able to access the entire 55 GB of storage that I bought.
There is no Ghost install CD, so I can't reinstall and then try to
figure this out through the software. I tried downloading "Partition
Logic", which is supposedly a clone of "Partition Magic", but even it
couldn't seem to see the Ghost partition.
What I want to do is eliminate the other partition altogether, or at
least shrink it down to next to nothing. Is buying a retail copy of
Norton Ghost my only option at this point?
.
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