Missing existing partition

agmck said:

Hi
I have a 250Gb HDD that is partitioned into two parts. I run W7 32bit. I have alwyas had the second partition as D drive and the first partition containing my boot as C drive. I recently added an external hdd and this is shown as E drive - my DVD is set as G drive.
When I go into EXplorer, Disk Mgt I cannot see the D drive partition and the C drive shows as only 123.xxGb - see attachment. I have tried allocating different drive letters, BIOS is up to date. Tried some partitioning software but the system ony allows them to scan C drive (123.xxGb).
If I unplug the external hdd and re-start the system the external hdd still shows.

I am yet to try a 6kg hammer but it's getting to that point - I'm missing something simple here I hope - please help!

agmck said:

Thanks for your help - here is the attachment of diskpartition results.

I think what's confusing me is the 3 "partitions" shown - I can only access 2 in explorer or disk mgt.

Can you pls advise me further?

Thanks in anticipation.

I've taken the liberty of making your screenshot more accesible and have attached it to my reply. You might want to look at this post: A Preferred Method of Uploading/Posting Screen Shots.

agmck - Original Screenshot

Now, to my reply.

What you see in explorer as drive E: is NOT your external drive, but is in fact the second partition of your 250GB drive. Your C: is 123.71GB, and E: is 109.17, which adds up to 232.88GB, which is about right for a 250GB drive had you created one single primary partition.

You have there two partitions, a primary and an extended. The extended contains a logical drive. This arrangement works well if you intend to slit a drive into more than 4 partitions (one primary, one extended containing X number of logical drives). The reason being that any sized drive is limited to a maximum of 4 primary partitions.

Nobody really uses the Primary/Extended+Logical arrangement anymore, which was popular in the days of DOS/Win9x and FAT16/FAT32 and a large drive had to be split into more manageable sizes that work with FAT which was I think limited to 20GB?. Most people these days split a drive into 2 primary, a smaller one around 120GB for the OS, and whatever is left for data, and then format those partitions as NTFS, thus eliminating the need for Extended+Logical partitions.

Me, I just avoid partitions entirely, and will rather add a second physical drive. I currently have 9:

Prometheus Hard Drives

You can see that even Windows prefers to use primary partitions during installation, as it creates a "System Reserved" parition, and whataever is left for the OS (unless you customize it during installation).

I don't know how you got it to be that way, but perhaps the partitioning software you used somehow cloned your external drive onto the second partition? Whatever used to be on what was the D: is unfortunately gone .

Hope this helps