Delete Hidden Partion? Is it Possible?

[truoc444]

I have an IBM thinkpad that has a recovery partition that takes up about 2 gigs of my hard drive. problem is this is a Hidden partition and somehow the image got corrupted. Basically i see no point in letting a corrupted image use 2 gigs of my hard drive i want to remove this partition.

hard drive is a 40 GB Hitachi Travelstar p/n 08K1089 and it came with an IBM Thinkpad R40. Any ideas anyone? i've tried qparted and it "seems" to delete the partition, but the drive still doesn't show the extra space when i go to format it.

thanks for any suggestions.

[techieMoe]

You might try using the partitioning/formatting tools that Hitachi provides. Most of these can be found on the Ultimate Boot CD.

[truoc444]

i've tried a utility i found on hitachi's site, but it didn't do the job. i'm downloading the UBCD now and am crossing my fingers.

[spencerf]

you can also try using fdisk from the command line:

fdisk /dev/hda
l         (to show your partitions)
d       (to delete the "hidden" partition
n       (to create a new partition where the "hidden" one once was)
w      (to quit and rewrite the partition table)

then you need to make the filesystem

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda?   [to create ext3] (where the ? is the partition number of the one you deleted and created)
mkfs.jfs /dev/hda? [to create jfs]

then you need to edit /etc/fstab and add an entry with a new mountpoint if you need help on this just ask.

[truoc444]

i know i know it's a lot of work for 2 Gigs, but it's the learning experience right? the hitachi drive utility from the Ultimate boot cd didn't work, nor the drive utility i downloaded directly from hitachi. using the command line looked like it worked until i got to the recreate partition part where yet again i lost those two gigs, but it appears i completely deleted the old image now it just won't let me have the space back. any other ideas?

[vlsimpson]

Try cfdisk. At least you'll get some kind of visual reprensentation of the drive.