App for finding hidden drives

[JosephLeo]

It's possible that someone accidently deleted the recovery partition. That would make unallocated space on the hard drive and identify it to the OS as missing 3 gigabytes. Try booting into gParted. It's a linux distro dedicated to doing only one thing. Managing partitions on a hard drive. I'm sure if this doesn't solve the problem then your only solution is to run some HDD diagnostics on it- and that can take some time.

[mekon]

Originally Posted by PatrickB

TestDisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
-- Patrick B.

Whoa! What a tool, flakey as hell but solid gold. It found and recovered it more or less straight away. Much as you suspected it's a partition within a partition and encrypted. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do next, but I definitely owe you a beer for that link. It's a total sledgehammer. Cheers, Patrick.

[Tweak]

Great reference Patrick, love that app, fixed me up quick and easy when a partition was damaged by software. Thanks for the reminder.

[red12049]

Not that it pertains directly to missing partitions, but I just got done using HDD regenerator on a drive that showed no partition and was mechanically going bad as well (screeching noise). Brought it back to life long enough for me to get what I needed from it. Good stuff.

Rick