lost partitions and Disk Management errors

Question

I reimaged an older laptop that has a 500GB drive. As part of the process, I partitioned the drive into three volumes: a drive T: and V: each with 100GB and C: got the balance. A day or so later, I noticed T: and V: mysteriously disappeared. Fortunately, I hadn't put anything in them yet, so there was no data loss. However, it seems that I've lost access to the disk space. Disk Management presents me with this:

All traces of T: and V: are gone. The C: volume shows 226GB (of which 148GB is free)... which is about what I think it had after I had partitioned the drive. But then below, the entry for Disk 0 shows C: is allocated 465GB... it's unclear where the 35GB balance went. If I try to shrink the volume, it presents me with the total size 476938MB and available shrink space 151834MB. If I try to shrink by even 1MB, it fails with error "Virtual Disk Manager: The parameter is incorrect."

Now that I'm in this state, is there any way to recover without starting over from scratch?

Answer 1

Use free Partition Wizard boot CD to Shrink C by as much as desired. 

Partition Wizard Resize Partition - Video Help.

Create and format desired Logical data partitions. 

Partition Wizard Create Partition - Video Help

Answer 2

Thanks! Partition Wizard was able to fix it.

Answer 3

Here it is again...

Answer 4

You should use snippingtool.exe to create a snapshot of the Disk Manager, save the snapshot to your hard disk then click the mountain symbol in the tool bar above your post to upload the snapshot file to your reply.