Partition magic 8.0-Deleted Partition!!

[DeathHawk]

Hi, I have just built my 1st ever pc and used Partition Magic 8.0 to make 3 Partitions.I stupidly decided to delete one but have now lost the 8GB that it held.I have done 3 XP repair and formats but it is still not seeing my lost partition.My Seagate Barracuda 200GB Hard Drive used to read 194GB but is Now 186-even after formatting-although Seagates site still sees the original 200GB.Luckily i saved all my data but its really annoying me that ive lost 8GB of space.I have tried Partition Magic to recover it but as i have formatted the drive i cannot undelete my error.Im new to partitions but i get the feeling that its still there but xp is just not reading it.The drive i deleted was F: and when i ran CHKDSK this was the result:

*Warning! f parameter not specified. running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
*Missing object id index entry or duplicate object id detected
*Errors found-CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode

I have not got a clue here so any help would be very much appreciated

Thanks

[pip22]

When you delete a partition, it becomes 'unpartitioned space' and remains so until you create a new partition for that space, then format it so Windows can read and write to it. Unpartitioned space cannot be seen by Windows, but it can be seen with partitioning tools like the DOS FDISK, and PartitionMagic, and either of these will create a new partition in that space so you can use it (after formatting). FDISK is a command line DOS tool and not easy to use, so I suggest you re-install Partitionmagic, highlight the physical disk which has the unpartitioned space you 'lost', and tell PM to create a partition in it. Don't know if PM can format, but you can do that with Windows XP --- Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - then select 'Disk Management' in left-hand pane.