Help! Hidden partition taking up half my hard drive space!

[slugbug]

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.

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?

 

[Joe Morris]

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.

I'm assuming that your BIOS reports only the 30 GB of space...right?

My guess -- and I've never worked with a consumer-grade Dell laptop so
I have no experience with the Inspiron's disk -- is that the disk was
configured with a "Host Protected Area" which is not exposed to the
operating system until you go through a specific waving-of-hands drill.
Note that this is a *hardware* feature in the disk drive itself.

If this is what's happened to you, it's probably part of the magic
push-a-button-to-reimage-the-system feature that in earlier days Dell
implemented by putting a Ghost image in the unallocated sectors at
the high-address end of the hard disk, and gave users the ZZTOP
utility to do the reimaging. I'll admit that the amount of missing
disk space seems excessive for that unless there's much more in the
hidden area than just a restore image.

A bit of sleuthing via Google yielded the following link that might
be of interest:

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm

Joe Morris

 

[Rod Speed]

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.

That is the result of the restore system used.

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.

Because the restore system hides part of the drive so
it wont get stomped on by users doing stuff like that.

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%.

Likely for the same reason, part of the drive is hidden
so it wont get stomped on by users running stuff like that.

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
back up the system and all the junk it had on it as shipped.

Its more complicated than that, some of the hiding is done by the
hardware itself, mainly so it wont get stomped on whatever the user does.

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.

The restore system likely does still work, so you should be able
to get it back that way. But it wont necessarily allow you to wipe
the restore partition even if you do that. In fact that is unlikely.

I tried downloading "Partition Logic", which is
supposedly a clone of "Partition Magic", but
even it couldn't seem to see the Ghost partition.

Yeah, it can be very effectively hidden from stuff like that.

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?

It wont help. Acronis Disk Director Suite likely
will but it may well be hidden even from it.

 

[Rod Speed]

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.