Missing disk space

I was working with partition Magic resizing my partitions and I had a section that I was trying to format its said the format was unreconized. When I tryed to reformat the only choice was unreconized. I went ahead and reformated the other sectionsnow all of a sudden the unreconized section is gone, and I am short about 8 gig. I booted to dos and used fdisk and removed all the partitions on that disk and recreated one and still it is short. Any Ideas?
Dennis