Power Outage while working with partitions

Zisc0r · 30 Jan 2016

Hi!

While using MiniTool Partition Wizard 9.0 to resize and allocate spaces between two partitions(let's call them A and B), a power outage happened, resulting in my PC shutting down.

What I did was first reduce the size of A and then added the Unallocated space to B and clicked on 'Apply'. A few seconds into the process is when the power went out. When I opened the PC back up after the power came, A(the one I took away space from) was not showing up in My Computer. However, on MiniTool, partition A is showing, but it has an asterisk(*) before it, just like the 'System Reserved' partition does. However, there isn't an Unallocated partition showing. One more thing is that A shows an unusually perfect size of Used and Unused(60 GB and 40 GB respectively).

My questions are, is my partition A the same size as before, because it clearly has more space unused in it than what it should show. If the unallocated space is missing, how can I recover it back? Also, how can I get A to show up on My Computer?

I've attached this photo to show you exactly what shows up on the computer screen.

Lance1 · 30 Jan 2016

It is clearly an NTFS file system but with out a drive letter. Have you tried changing that partitions drive letter from the option in the left column?

bigmck · 30 Jan 2016

You are making things a bit complicated by calling them Partition A and B when there is no A and B on your PC. Call them what they are so as to make things a bit clearer and tell us which partition you were changing. You should add a drive letter to your Software partition. Do that by using this Tutorial. Drive Letter - Add, Change, or Remove in Windows

Zisc0r · 31 Jan 2016

Before the power went out, that partition had a letter. I'll definitely give it a letter, and try out the process again. Thanks to both of you!

Also, @bigmck, I just felt giving out a lot of info on the two drives wold make it easy to spot them out from the picture, but I'll tell you now. Drive A is 'Softwares and Games' and Drive B is 'Other'.

EDIT: Well, I gave 'Softwares and Games' a letter and that seemed to make it appear again. After that, I just resized and extended between the two partitions and it worked. Though I'm not sure all the space I took out of it is still there. Question: Do most 500GB HDDs(old ones atleast) have about 460GB actually usable?

bigmck · 31 Jan 2016

Zisc0r said:

Before the power went out, that partition had a letter. I'll definitely give it a letter, and try out the process again. Thanks to both of you!

Also, @bigmck, I just felt giving out a lot of info on the two drives wold make it easy to spot them out from the picture, but I'll tell you now. Drive A is 'Softwares and Games' and Drive B is 'Other'.

EDIT: Well, I gave 'Softwares and Games' a letter and that seemed to make it appear again. After that, I just resized and extended between the two partitions and it worked. Though I'm not sure all the space I took out of it is still there. Question: Do most 500GB HDDs(old ones atleast) have about 460GB actually usable?

Yes, a 500 GB HDD will never hold 500 GB. It will usually be about 460 GB. Why you may ask? A GB is 1024 MB, not 1000 MB as is assumed. Divide 500 GB by 1024 MB and you will see about what it holds. Even after the math it may not be exactly, but you get the idea.

GokAy · 01 Feb 2016

Hey!

Actually it would be exact, but you have to calculate from Bytes and up :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

465.6612873077393 = 500 x 1000/1024(MB) x 1000/1024(KB) x 1000/1024(B)