| Windows can't find an existing partition. Partition sizes messed up.
I've looked and looked for answers to this problem and I can't find a definitive answer so I'm asking here for help.
I have a 300GB HD. Two months ago, I partioned it so that one partition was roughly 120GB for the C drive (Windows) and the other was 180GB. A few weeks ago, I decided to repartition the C drive so that it was smaller and add the free space onto the 180GB partition instead.
Today, I needed to format Windows. I formatted and installed all relevant updates but for some reason, Windows made a new 120GB partition instead of simply formatting the 30GB one. I didn't realise this until I had installed Windows.
Once I had installed all relevant updates for Windows and my motherboard/graphics card etc., I noticed that my other partition was not showing up in My Computer. All I could see was a 120GB Windows partition. I right clicked on My Computer, clicked Manage and saw that 170GB of space on the drive was now unallocated. I clicked on "Change Drive Letter and Paths" and set up a new drive in the hopes that I could restore my old partition. However, this doesn't seem to have worked because when I try to access the drive, Windows tells me that the drive hasn't been formatted yet and asks if I want to format it. I certainly do not want to format it as it has a hell of a lot of stuff on the drive that I need.
I've installed R-Studio in the hopes that it will recover my lost data and that's currently running in the background now, but this doesn't really solve my problem of the partitions being the wrong sizes to begin with. As I said, although my partitions were roughly 120GB/180GB to begin with, I resized them so that they were 30GB/270GB and when I formatted Windows earlier, Windows saw that C:\ was indeed 30GB so I don't understand why it's not 120GB.
So, in summary, I need to know how to get my 270GB partition back and make my Windows drive 30GB again without losing my data on my 270GB partition.
Many many thanks. | 
