10GB Suddenly Unallocated??

WinXP Pro SP2

In the midst of slipstreaming a bootable CD, a message displayed that I was out of disk space. Checking disk properties, only 282MB were available of the 18GB capacity.

??

This did not make sense - the disk is 30GB HD & have had the entire disk, unpartitioned, available since its new purchase.

Checking Disk Management from the Computer Management snap-in: Local Disk (C:\) 18.17GB NTFS Healthy (System) & 9.77GB unallocated is visible.

Here's what I've tried:

Command line > diskpart > list volume > select volume 1 > extend

Message displayed:

"DiskPart failed to extend the volume. Please make sure the volume is valid for extending "

Two questions:

1) What might cause the 30GB HD to suddenly break 10GB off as unallocated?

2) How may I combine the unallocated portion w/ the rest of my basic volume C:\ to get one 30GB disk?

 

1) Might speculate notebook's heavy duty use & carried everywhere allowed an anomoly - but don't know

2) Downloaded bootable Gnome Partition Editor LiveCD iso from SourceForge (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/).

I went ahead & booted to it after burning. After getting it to boot w/ the right settings, it was superior! I resized that puppy inside of 37 seconds, rebooted, had one 30GB drive, done, BAM!

I will keep the tool for future use - nice turn on, Lew!