Had a motherboard failure and it affected the hard drive. Big partition is missing and the drive is displayed as much smaller than it actually is. I don't care about the data, but I'd like to use the hard drive again at its normal capacity. I was running Kubuntu 64, left the computer on and found it dead the next morning, wouldn't post, smell of ozone near the computer. Swapped around known working components, I'm certain it was the moboard.

So I replaced the board and I was all set to reinstall. Except that the drive showed only the NTFS windows partition and root Linux partition (combined 40 gigs). There's approximately 120 gigs on there of the former swap and /home that I can't see. I tried zero-filling the drive, hoping it would just magically hit everything, but it's left me with a drive that's reported in the Kubuntu install dialogue (and an old version of Partition Magic and a host of other partition tools) as 38 gigs unformatted.

How can I get the full drive back? I tried a bunch of partition programs off an old copy of Hiram's Boot Disk that I have, nothing sees the missing partition.

Doing this from a linux bootdisk would be preferable. I could install XP on the visible space and use a windows app if that's going to be best but obviously I'm a bit sick of tinkering a the moment. Recovery of the data is not necessary.

If you give me command line instructions please talk to me like I'm dim. Because I AM! Also if you think the drive is not coming back, feel free to tell me.