unable to see partition

I recently shrank my had drive and made a data partition. I then did a factory restore and installed windows on the c partition. Everything seemed to go well. I now can not see the D partition. It only shows up in Computer Management. It will not allow me to do anything with it. It is calling it OEM partition. What do I need to do to recover this?


thanks

Can you post a screen shot of Disk management?

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2598-screenshots-files-upload-post-eight-forums.html



Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image - Windows 7 Help Forums

First, "Welcome to the Eight Forums." . . .

I have done what I am about to recommend, albeit if you are unsure that you are capable of doing this then please don't try. Okay having given you fair warning here goes:

Put in your Win 8 Install Disc or Thumb Drive and allow the install system to bring you to the point where you select which disc you want to install your system on. Now find the drive you stated is your "D" (ensure you have the correct drive) then reformat. Once it has been reformatted back out of the reinstall process. Next restart Win 8 to see if you have the drive back. This is not a guarantee, but again it did work for me. . .good luck

Set Drive Letter?

Only your "OS" partition (C: ) and DVD drive (D: ) have drive letters.

Right click on your "Back UP" partition and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths ..."

If you want your "Back UP" partition to be (D: ) you will have to remove the drive letter from the DVD drive and replace it with a different one (e.g. (E: )).

The first question I would ask is, do you have any recollection of the original configuration of the drive? Such as which partitions were there before you shrank the original partition.

The second question would be, does you owner's manual describe the factory restore process as in which partitions does it replace or wipe.

It looks like the factory restore tried to do what it was supposed to do. But the configuration possibly confused it so you may have an extra partition or a partition of the wrong size.

I would think there were two things you needed to do. The first is to open Diskpart in an Administrative command prompt and look at the actual drive partitions. Perhaps the layout would give us a clue as to what partitions are needed. If it were necessary, you could also remove a partition or change the Partition ID which would allow you to work with it. In the command window, you can right click and select mark, the hit enter to copy. You could then paste the listing here. There is probably a Diskpart tutorial on the site, but I do not know where it is. If you need help, post back.

After that, booting into something like Partition Wizard should allow you to see the partitions and what in in them. You might be able to do this by using Diskpart to assign a drive letter, but the Home bootable version of Partition Wizard would be fairly easy.

The following is a listing of my Windows 8 drive, which is not OEM so no OEM partitions are listed, But whether yours shows the Recovery or EFI partition first, the MSR (Reserved) should be before the OS partition. This partition is not shown on the Disk Management Window.

DISKPART> lis dis

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 223 GB 1024 KB *
* Disk 1 Online 119 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 2 Online 1863 GB 1024 KB *

DISKPART> sel dis 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> lis par

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Recovery 300 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 System 99 MB 301 MB
Partition 3 Reserved 128 MB 400 MB
Partition 4 Primary 118 GB 528 MB

Click to expand...

I would suggest you just do another factory restore, but without knowing which partitions might be required, hard to go that way.

I can see right on that image you posted - You have NOT assigned a drive letter to the partition you made. Else it would show on the partition. Just right-click on the partition and choose "add drive letter" - DO this for all of the partitions you want to see.

lehnerus2000 posted an image that shows how. I had this problem just yesterday, I have a USB drive that won't automatically get assigned.

problem

I had one large hard drive. I shrank it and put files to the partition. I used it for a while, then the kids messed up my computer. I ran the recovery and this is what I am left with. I was very care full not to mess with the backup partition. In the computer management I can do nothing with this. This was my D drive before.

I am not sure where to start. But I could have sworn the last two partitions were is an extended partitions when you posted earlier. I must be getting old....

I would still like to see the list I asked for earler. It might help.

My best guess is the Partition ID, or the attributes for the partition are showing it as an OEM partition, which is not accessible. One way to tell is to run diskpart, and select that drive and then list partitions. With the list of partitions, you can compare the information for the C: and the one you created to see if they are the same, or the one you made is the same as the last one.

So open the Admin command prompt again and use Diskpart

Diskpart
lis dis
sel dis 0 the one you need to look at
lis par
sel par 5 or whichever partition you want to check
det par

Check the info and copy and paste the ID numbers and Attribute for the partitions. We can tell from those numbers what might be going on. To copy in the command promt, right click and select Mark, then highlight the numbers and hit enter. Then you can paste it back in the forum.

This is the only way I can think to get your system straightened out. Perhaps someone else will have more experience with the OEM type installs.

formeryank said:

I had one large hard drive. I shrank it and put files to the partition. I used it for a while, then the kids messed up my computer. I ran the recovery and this is what I am left with. I was very care full not to mess with the backup partition. In the computer management I can do nothing with this. This was my D drive before.

Click to expand...

Don't Fret - Use Hiren's Boot CD, boot to Mini Windows XP.

In there, you can re-assign the drive letters that are locked out when you are using the system, specifically if one of them is the boot drive.

Stuff like this happens when you use that damned F11 key to do a "Rescue" on new puters. What happens is,m the repair op assigns the drive letters in order of how they appear on the whole partition. Usually the repair partition is BEFORE the C partition, but after an F11 Rescue Op, it will assign drive C to the rescue partition, locking you out of your OS.

So you can use Hiren's Boot CD and Mini Windows XP to change the partition assignments, remove the drive letter for C and then re-assign C to the real Boot Volume. Then leave the rescue partition un-assigned.