One of the partitioned drive is missing...

Hi, over the weekend I did a clean install of Window Vista Ultimate. I partitioned the drive when I installing the OS...after it finished installing I can't find the partitioned drive...any idea where it went?

Any help would much appreciated...thank!

Your post is unclear. You say, "I partitioned the drive when I installing the OS", which could mean you created ONE Partition on which to install the OS, OR it could mean you tried to create more than one Partition. The Windows Vista Install routines will create and Format one bootable Primary Partition of a size you specify. But to create other Partitions in addition, you would have had to use some tools on your own. PLUS, when you do that, you need to Format those extra drives.

So, did you manually create a second (or more) Partition and Format it (them)? Or, did you only create the first Partition that the Install process used? When you say, "I can't find the partitioned drive", how are you looking for it, and what do you see?

What MIGHT have happened is that Windows has failed to recognize the extra valid Partition, OR you failed to Format the D: Partition.

Go into Disk Manager thusly: click on Start, then in the menu RIGHT-click on My Computer and choose Manage. In the resulting window on the left expand "Storage" if necessary, then choose "Disk Management". In the upper right pane you'll see your C: boot drive. In the lower right pane (it scrolls) you will see blocks representing devices, and one of them will be the HDD unit with a name like "Disk 0". It will show at least two blocks: one for your existing C: Partition, and one or more others. If you did successfully create another Partition it will be there. If not, the only other block will be called "Unallocated Space", from which you CAN create and then Format more Partitions. But assuming there is a block that is supposed to be your D: drive, check two things by RIGHT-clicking on it. First, does it already have a letter name (like D: or E? If not choose to Change its Name.

Ooops! side track here: IF you want to name your Partitions C: and D:, and then have your optical drive as E:, but the optical already is being called D:, you can change it. First you RIGHT-clock on the Optical and change it to a name not currently in use, like E: or whatever. Then you RIGHT-click on the HDD Partition you want, and change its name to D: (now available).

If the missing name was the only problem, exiting out of Disk Manager and rebooting will get the drive available. But IF that D: Partition was never Formatted, you should do that first. Again, RIGHT-click the Partition and choose Format. Use the NTFS File System unless you really know you need FAT32, and I recommend a Quick Format. It takes about 10- 15 minutes. A Full Format, which takes MANY hours, does a Quick one and then exhaustively checks the disk for hardware problems, not usually necessary on a new disk. Once you Format the Partition and make sure it has a name, it should show up just fine in My Computer when Windows is rebooted.

OK, took me awhile to find the disk management...it found the unallocated block. I formatted it and wallah the drive shown up. Thanks Paperdoc!