Wiped Drives And Partitioning Problems

Today, Tims asks:

I have just wiped my 20G hard drive and reformatted using a program I bought from stopmau.com.
This was a boot up disk program on my CD ROM. Now I have XP up and running again but i can only see 5G of the 20? I have emailed this problem to stopmau who promised email support for 1 year but they keep emailing my back just to say they are looking at this problem. I feel very let down by this company as their web site promises to return an answer within 2 hours. This has now gone on for 4 days and every email i sent gets the same reply.

Well Tim, I stopped by the web address you provided and it seems that it is merely a parked domain now, so not sure who this other company might have been. As for getting your partitioning straighten out, I would purchase a reliable product like Partition Magic. I would point you to something from the free/open source source side of the fence, but something tells me that Partition Magic is going to be a better fit for you.

Partition Magic will allow you to really get a glimpse of what is going on and see where the missing space has gone to. It’s a simple, yet powerful program and it even has a fantastic undo feature should it be needed - before the actually changes are applied after a reboot, that is. Download the free trial version, use this to see if that missing hard drive space shows up for you. Then, if you are feeling good about the product and have located the missing space, you can safely purchase the full version from this link.

Now a word of warning. Anytime you are making changes to your Windows partitions, you will always want to be ready for something to go terribly wrong. The chances are very, very slim, but you should always have up to date back-ups regardless - no exceptions, unless the data is safe to lose.

Another thing to consider is making sure there are no keyloggers installed as this other application sounds very suspicious to me. Just a quick Google query for this “stopmau” turns up some rather disturbing findings with little indication that this was ever a real company. Rule of thumb, ask me or another Lockergnomie for recommendations before trusting random software vendors. Because next time it might not just be faulty software, it could mean identity theft.

Do you have an IT-related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt!”

Also, don’t forget to check out “Just Ask Matt,” Linux Edition!

[tags]partition magic, hard drive, keylogger removal[/tags]