How do you find a hidden partition?

My son called a while ago and told me a friend of his was trying to install GoBack but the program wouldn't install because of a "hidden partition. "

From what I understand his friend has not put a hidden partition on his computer. He only has three partitions on his drive and they all show up in My Computer.

This is his home computer and he's running 98SE.

Said he's had the computer for a couple of years now. Bought it new, partitioned, formatted the hdd and installed the OS. Hasn't messed with since as far as reformatting the entire hdd. Said he has formatted two of the partitions since his first format but he's done nothing to warrent a hidden partition.

He's not familiar with hidden partitions (neither am I) and wants to know if there is a way to check for one.

Thanks

 

Maybe boot from a win98 bootdisk and run fdisk. Then have a look at the partition info. Look for one labeled as a non dos partition (maybe). Otherwise, Partition Magic would probably show it. Does your friend have it by any chance?

 

Hi Zander,

I'm not sure about Partition Magic, I'll have to ask but from what I understand he knows less about computers than I do and I don't know that much.

Using Fdisk in that manner wouldn't harm his partitions would it? I only ask because I'm no expert with it I just know how to delete a partition, then create one. I've never looked to see any info about the partition. I only have a 6GB hard drive so I just use the whole thing as C:. I guess he knows tho, not sure. I didn't ask how he partitioned his drive. Let me call my son real quick and see if he knows. If not he will call him and get back to me and I'll get back here.

Talk about going around your elbow to get to your......

 

No Partition Magic, he used fdisk to partition. He checked the partition info and said it showed that he had 4 partitions instead of 3. The three he recognized, one he didn't. He thinks the unknown is a hidden partition but unsure because it wasn't assigned a drive letter.

He wants to know if he can delete it with fdisk without messing up his other partitions or losing any info and

Does anyone have any idea how it got there?

I'm asking here because I don't know what to tell him. I'm not that experienced with fdisk and zero experienced with hidden partitions.

Thanks for any info.

 

Well, I suspect your friend can delete the partition with fdisk. That said, he (she) won't be able to recover the lost space using fdisk without losing everything. If they were using Partition Magic they could delete the partition and also recover the space. I don't know how this happens but I've run into it several times in the past. Twice on one of my own computers, once on my brothers and a couple times on those of my friends. I would have accused them all of doing it themselves if it hadn't happened to me. In all cases the partition was around 7 meg (maybe a bit more) . Never have figured out where they came from. I always deleted them (though I had to jump through some hoops to do it) but without looking at it I would hesitate to tell you to do that for sure. It's up to you. Maybe wait and see if you get any other feedback here. It would be interesting to know how large the partition is.

 

Hi All:

I get that same/similar problem on this machine, format a drive and end up with approx 7mb of unallocated/unpartitioned space, no drive letter, sometimes shows up between partitions, sometimes in front, sometimes at the end of a drive formatted with two or more partitions.

Last time it happened, with no input from me I swear, I got rid of it using Partition Magic, I don't remember exactly how, but I do remember not being able to expand existing partition with Partition Magic to add that space. I just could not get that 7MB where it could be used. I think I finally had to reformat the whole drive to get it absorbed.

Sorry I can't be of help, but wish you luck.

Martin

 

I know what you mean. That's what I meant by having to jump through hoops to get rid of it. I did manage to get rid of it without formatting but don't really remember how I did it. It's been a while since I've run into this. That's the problem. Everytime I run into it, it's been a while since the last time and I always have to figure it out again. Maybe a sign of me getting older????

 

Yeah, well, when your 70th birthday slides on by, no maybe about it, you know it is!!

I feel the same way about that unusable 7MB as I do about income tax. Can't do anything about that income tax, but I'll be darned if I'm giving up that space.

So, I guess I'll be doing that dance again someday, even though I've forgotten the steps, I remember the music.

 

Morning,

I haven't heard anything from my son yet, guess the younguns went out for the night, but I'll pass the info along when I do.

Since these hidden partitions spring up from time to time I'm just wondering if its some flaw with the partitioning software maybe. Just guessing here.

No mention was made of the size of it, but I'll ask.

Thanks for the input guys,

 

Update

Well the young whippersnappers didn't bother to call me back to see what I had found out for them. Instead they tried to delete the partition on their own using fdisk.

To make a long story short, they deleted all the partitions. I had a good laugh when he called wanting to know if there was any way to save his data before formatting. Seems he didn't have much in a way of backups. I told him no, just format and reinstall.

So they got their work cut out for them.

Thanks for the input though. I'm still getting a good chuckle out of this.

 

My prehistoric Compaq Prolinea5100 used to have a hidden partition for setup and utilities - but has no more after change to larger HDD!
...but still functions fine, as long as you don't want to change BIOS settings or the like.
The setup and diagnostics stuff is downloadable from Compaq (at least for a while I think they are withdrawing the support site - at least in its current guise - quite soon). Both setup and diagnostics run happily from floppies.
You get the ability to recreate the setup partition but this is often a bad idea, particularly if any sort of BIOS kludge is used to see the whole of a large HDD. In my case installing either the setup partition or the BIOS kludge nukes the other of the pair.
Symptom of lost setup partition (quite a lot of Compaqs not all): during POST the cursor should change briefly to a block at the top RH of the screen - this is when you are meant to hit F10 to get into setup. If the setup partition is lost this doesn't happen.
Umm - will tweakUI hide/unhide partitions? I've only just discovered today - there seems to be an option - haven't had the courage to try yet (not until backup done anyway!)
best wishes, HJ

 

Nope, Tweakui won't see the partition. The partitions hidden so..... The only way I know of to see it is to use fdisk or partition magic (or something similar) . Twice I've had these hidden partitions and have run into it on several other puters. In all cases I know that there was no OEM stuff involved. All but one was homebuilt and the one that wasn't was manufactured in the days when you still got a windows disk and there was no such thing as image files etc. Mine occurred on new hard drives that were formatted and partitioned by me. The others I'm pretty confident the people who did the partitioning knew what they were doing. I maybe would have accused them of messing up when they first came to me with it except that it had happened to me and I know I did nothing to create them. In fact, from time to time I would use Partion Magic to change something and the partition wouldn't be there. All of a sudden one day I open PM and there's the 7m/b partition. As I said before, I remember it was tough to get rid of. PM showed the format as being fat, not fat 16 or fat 32. You couldn't do anything with it in PM. All the tools like merge, format, delete etc. were grayed out. If I unhid the partition I could read from and write to it like any other drive and it caused no problems at all. It'll probably always remain a mystery to me unless someone on this board can come up with the answer. I spent way to much time trying to find out why the occur and finally decided it wasn't worth losing any sleep over.

 

Yeah, especially when it is 7mb on an 80Gig drive!

Martin

 

Upon first glance that would seem to be a possibility but the problem with that is that the drives were in use for months before the partitions appeared in PM. One day it didn't see them and the next it did. I am reasonably sure that that's not what was happening (in these cases anyway).