Disk Drives (HDD, CD/DVD, Blu-ray)

Re: Trying to add partition to HDD

Xelkos — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:59:59 GMT

I use Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 when I need drive partition management. In Vista it's a bit harder than with XP, as Vista wants about 10x more space made available than what is used. It's quite annoying to resize on the fly, but Disk Director makes understanding what partitions to what drives are, diagnostics, changing drive letters, and hiding partitions, and can even clone a partition from one to the other. It does a lot more, click the link to see more.

Re: Trying to add partition to HDD

dbird1999 — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:33:11 GMT

Hm! Is there a link or somewhere I can go to find out how the recovery partition fits in functionally with the others? If I delete the upper partition, that may make the recovery partition useless... I have seen other Dell Inspirons with a recovery partition but without the upper 2.5GB partition.

Thanks,

Dave

Re: Trying to add partition to HDD

Dev Mgr — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:26:10 GMT

Your computer has a bios. This means your bootdisk uses MBR for it's partitioning layout. GPT is an alternative, but a computer that has a bios cannot boot to a GPT disk.

What this means is that your MBR disk can have:

- 4 primary partitions, or

- 3 primary partitions + 1 extended partition (which could have 1 or more logical drives in it)

So as your EISA partition, recovery partition, boot partition and that other 2.5GB partition are all primary partitions, you're at the max of 4 primary partitions. This is why you cannot add any more partitions.

Re: Trying to add partition to HDD

dbird1999 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:32:38 GMT

This still leaves the question of how to make a logical partition, and how to reduce a partition even more after an initial amount. The help isn't much help...

I'd appreciate anyone who cares to answer these.

Thanks in advance,

Dave

Re: Trying to add partition to HDD

shesagordie — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:04:19 GMT

dbird1999

You are welcome.

Bev.

Re: Trying to add partition to HDD

dbird1999 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:29:29 GMT

Hm! Seems like if one has a data backup solution, that might be also OK for the OS and programs backup and restore too. I like Norton Ghost for both. It has saved my skin quite a few times. So, if I want to deviate from my factory condition much I might be better off just dumping the rhe restore functionality and going with ghost...

Thanks for the reply.

Dave

Re: Trying to add partition to HDD

shesagordie — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:53:23 GMT

dbird1999

The 86mb EISA partition is the Dell Diagnostics and 2.5gb partition is the PC Restore utility, this restores the
system to an as-shipped factory condition.

See HERE

Bev.

Trying to add partition to HDD

dbird1999 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:33:11 GMT

My puter is an Inspiron 1720. The factory disk config is 86MB EISA primary no drive letter, D:\ 10GB NTFS Recovery primary, C:\ 285GB NTFS Boot etc primary, and 2.5GB primary no drive letter. I can shrink the boot partition, but then I can't seem to find a way to make the space that it leaves into a logical partition.

First question is what is the function of the 1st partition with 86MB, and the 4th partition with 2.50GB? What do I sacrifice if I delete the 2.5GB partition?

Second question is how do I make a logical partition out of the empty space? I don't see any way to do this.

Third question is how can I shrink the boot partition even more?

Thanks,

Dave