Scary Mysterious Drive I Don't Know About!!!! Help!!!!

[aimeeandbeatles]

Did the title get your attention? Good.

I installed a new program, and for some reason there's a second hard drive on my computer that I don't know about. There's no drive letter or label.

The capacity is 4745 MB, 0% is used, FAT32, and non-bootable.

Any idea?

 

[Cutlass]

take a screen shot so we can get a better idea of it.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I was trying programs to see if any of them would detect my drive's SMART thingy. Oh, and the word that was partly cut off is "FAT32 Hidden"

EDIT: Wait, I remember when they first tried this as a loaner for me, the BIOS was passworded just before it tried to get into Vista. And when I was messing around in the BIOS trying to see if it had a recovery partition, it *did*, but that was passworded too. And when I got this one as my permanent computer, I noticed th=at the recovery partition was gone, as I was trying to do a fresh install. COULD THIS BE IT????

 

[Cutlass]

It looks to me like it's just a leftover piece of the drive that wasn't included for one reason or another in the active partition. It might have been set aside for recovery use.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Here's in Windows Computer Management

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Yep, its just a piece of your HDD that wasnt formatted somewhy.

 

[Maniacal]

Awww shoot, you've uncovered my secret spying operation on you!

Er, I mean, that's strange. I have no idea what it is so I'll go with GB.

 

[Turner]

It's a recovery partition, I bet.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

It's a recovery partition, I bet.

Too small. Unless there's some serious compression going on there. Vista recovery disk actually takes up 1.5 DVD's, so the recovery partition would be more than that. 10 GB maybe, most likely something like 15.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

There was a recovery partition, but the tech guy deleted it because it was passworded, or something like that. So that might be the remains of it.

 

[Thunderfall]

My laptop has a partition with no name too. I assumed it's recovery partition.

 

[lndm]

Does it have a filesystem on it? (doesn't seem to)

It is a type FAT32 Hidden, which is not uncommon for recovery partitions and it also seems to be the first partition, which suggests the same thing. It is also the right size, IMO.

You might try accessing it in all the usual ways (including using any disks that came with the system). If you're bored one day as a last ditch effort, you might do a quick format (FAT32) and use an undelete utility on it.

Did the title get your attention?

I thought you'd plugged in a printer with a card reader.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Can you access the partition from My Computer?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

No.

Anyways, according to both screenshots, there's nothing in there anyways. So there's nothing to look at. Eventually I'll probably just delete it.