Missing Hard drive space after PC crashed

[jdogsc]

My computer recently crashed and I reloaded Windows Xp and I was able to restore the OS. My computer had one hard drive with 2 paritions, C drive and D drive (which was a FAT32 partition). The total hard drive space had 40 GB and now after my computer crashed it only has 37.5 GB of hard drive space. There is a cluster of about 2.5 GB that I cannot access even after I restored my PC with Windows XP. So is there any way I can get back the 2.5 GB of hard drive space? If so, how can I do this?

Thanks

[Twey]

Try rewriting the partition table.

[jdogsc]

Try rewriting the partition table.

How would I do that?

[lainlives]

Partition Table Doctor can do it, but it costs money, Twey might be able to come up with a free one, he is cheap like that.

j/k Twey

[Twey]

Most partitioning programs will do it. Windows' fdisk will suffice.

[lainlives]

xp home doesnt have it, i have tried alot, as far as i know it could just be xp lacking it altogether

[Twey]

I'm pretty sure it exists still. They might have moved it to the recovery console. It's DOS-based, running it from a GUI won't do much.

[jdogsc]

I have Norton partition magic and it detects the missing hard drive space but that's all it seems to do. Is there anything in Norton partition magic that I could use to restore it?

Thanks

[Twey]

I'm not familiar with that program, but you could perhaps try just growing your main partition into it.

[lainlives]

I'm pretty sure it exists still. They might have moved it to the recovery console. It's DOS-based, running it from a GUI won't do much.

i did it in 9x and 2k, they removed it, chkdsk does do minor recovory of things, the one in xp is much better than the old ones


oh the run menu is a command prompt