i made a partition on my hard drive so i had C drive and a D drive on my computer. thats was succesfully done. then i wanted to format my computer and start all over without deleting the partiton, when i was loading windows xp and when it says where u want to save windows, the partiton drive was shown but when windows was fully loaded on my computer the partition doesnt show. but my drive is 26.9gb and i only have access to 10gb which i assigned when doing the partition. the rest i dont know where its gone. i want to bring that partition back without deleting or losing any of the data. so the current problem is that from a 26.9gb hard drive only 10gb is showing on C drive and the partition drive D drive is not. could someone please help me solve this problem!

Go back to Fdisk and verify that the extended partition exists. I think that you stopped using fdisk before you were finished. After creating a primary partition and marking it active you need to go back to the same option and create an extended partition using all awailable space. Then create a logical drive in the extended partition using all available space. If you intend to redo you XP install and you are not sure if the partitions are correct, simply redo the whole thing. You may need to use a different utility to delete the existing partitions if you formatted with NTFS. Use Delpart to remove all partitions. Then use fdisk to create partitions as described. Remember to reboot before formatting anything. If you are using FAT32 for some reason, Keep your primary partition down to 8000KB in order to keep the cluster size at 4KB instead of 8KB, which wastes space with OS installations in FAT32. Boot to the windows disk and install on C: Then you need to format the second partition from within winXP for it to show in My computer. I don't use XP so I am unsure of how you format that partition. Look under management of some sort.

If you have left the unused space unpartitioned. WinXP should be able to partition and format it. If no one here can tell you how to do it in XP, the XP forum should be able to.

"D:" drive may not be showing because it is not formatted, or not partitioned properly. Look at the whole drive, partition and format it with the disk management utility that was installed with XP. Right click my computer, select manage and on the lower left side click disk management.