18 GB free space suddenly disappeared ?

Question

I was installing ubuntu alongside with win 7, and I devoted a full partition for linux during installation. The problem is it didnt install correctly and the 18 GB space cant be found when logging in to win 7 . Please Help.

Answer 1

One thing you could do is to use your installation device USB/CD to log into a live Ubuntu session. For this boot from your device and choose 'Try out Ubuntu'. There your can view your patitions with 'gparted' and change whatever you like.

You should find your lost partition there.

Under Windows 7 you can go to Computer Management and then to Disk Management.

Answer 2

Building on what @joschi said,

Partitions are a way for operating system sto mark the space on your hard drive into sections that can be used separately, for different things. When you installed linux, it would have created one or more of:

• An ext3 or ext4 partition as the / (root) directory within linux. This is where system files are stored.
• Another ext3 or ext4 partition as the /home/ directory from within linux. This is where personal, configurational, and some other stuff (pics, downloads, etc) is stored.
• A 'swap' partition, which isn't accessible from the file system (it's not mounted to a directory), and is used when you get low on RAM (it's equivalent to the Windows swap files).

To be able to do that, the installer would have looked at the amount of space that Windows was actually using, and then resized it's partition. With this extra space, (18 gb, it seems) it created the extra partitions.

To regain the lost capacity, and make Windows recognize that it's there, you need to:

• !!!BACKUP ANYTHING THAT ON YOUR COMPUTER THAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU!!!
• You may not lose everything on your hard drive... but you might, too. It's easy to make a mistake (especially the first time you do this). So...
• !!!BACKUP ANYTHING THAT ON YOUR COMPUTER THAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU!!!
• From within Windows, launch the Computer Management utility and then find Disk Management on the left-side.
• Locate the partitions that are marked as something other than ntfs/fat/fat32. Your windows partitions are almost certainly ntfs, so be careful not to do something that would harm those partitions.
• Once you have found the correct partitions remove them (right-click), and then resize your ntfs partition to fill the space.