Not an AH question but any help/suggestions appreciated.
I have a 300G maxtor external USB drive that I had plugged into my liksys router as a network storage drive. At some point I had to redo the firmware on the router and ended up "resizing" the drive to 203G's (not my choice, something in the share triggered it)...
I didnt think it was a big deal at the time figuring I could always use the maxblast utility to undo the "damage" if I felt like it. I recently took a disk image of my business laptop and then low level formatted it and rolled it back to XP. After reloading everything I wanted (and blowing out all the crap I didnt) I plane on taking a new image of the "pristine" loadout vs ever having to reconfiger the whole thing. I have a 500G acomdata drive I use for the same thing on my desk top and figured I'd reformat and use the maxtor with my laptop....
So....
I cant recover it, even the drives own utility only shows the 203G...even though it recognizes it correctly. I'm concerned having anything thats "hidden" in my system. I dont know if this is a screened partition (similiar to what acronis sets up) and potentially "harmful" or if it is possible to actually lose a third of your drive. I've ever seen a situation where you cant low level format a drive to recover it. It's possible I'm missing something on the utility since I couldnt specifically select a low level format (just format and quick format). Guess I could use the dos command line if needed...
Anyone else ever run into this...1st time I've seen it in 15+yrs or so of building PC's.
