Hard drive screwed up?

[dr.stevil]

I've been using my primary disk for a windows partition and a storage partition for quite a while now, despite many re-installs (would always delete the windows partition, and create a new one with the unpartitioned storage space).

The last 2 times I re-installed windows, I noticed that it was showing the following (after deleting the windows partition)

disk0
unpartitioned space 2000mb
partitioned space drive d: 2999mb
unpartitioned space 2000mb
unpartitioned space 9mb

this in on a 500gb hard drive btw. When I create a partition it still shows the second "unpartitioned space 2000mb" even though that doesnt exist. I know a little is usually left over (the 9mb for example) but that seems a little excessive lol If I try allocating that space, opposed to the first "unpartitioned space 2000mb", it gives me an error

how can I fix this without having to wipe the drive and start from scratch? I just finished upgrading to SP1 and don't have the dvd's to backup all of the storage/D: partition. Has anyone had anything similar to this happen?

 

[tiraides]

You'll need a freeware partitioning program call GParted. Download it, burn it (as an ISO) onto a disc, and run the disc as you would the Windows install disc.

(If you can, find a way to make a backup of your data before using GParted.)

GParted may be complicated for first-time users, but there are plenty of online guides available for it. I suggest checking out a couple of guides before you start to use it -- the SourceForge page also has a robust guide.