How to tell if a partition is primary?

[Sal]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1200 that has 16MB partition that's used for
diagnostic testing. The disk management snap-in only tells me that
it's 16MB FAT, Healthy (EISA configuration). I need to know if this
counts as one of my four primary partitions. How can I tell? When I
right click on it, it just brings up a help menu for the Disk
Management Console.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1200 that has 16MB partition that's used for
diagnostic testing. The disk management snap-in only tells me that
it's 16MB FAT, Healthy (EISA configuration). I need to know if this
counts as one of my four primary partitions. How can I tell? When I
right click on it, it just brings up a help menu for the Disk
Management Console.

Have a look at the colour codes shown at the bottom of the
disk management frame.

 

[Bill in Co.]

Pretty sure it does, along with the Dell System Restore partition, and your
Windows partition (so that's 3 primary partitions in use). At least
that's the way it is over here.

Actually, it *does* tell you, if you look carefully at the color bar legend
(in Disk Management).

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1200 that has 16MB partition that's used for
diagnostic testing. The disk management snap-in only tells me that
it's 16MB FAT, Healthy (EISA configuration). I need to know if this
counts as one of my four primary partitions. How can I tell? When I
right click on it, it just brings up a help menu for the Disk
Management Console.

I've always assumed that it does. Try creating another Primary
partition to test it. Since Dell includes a CD with the same diagnostic
utilities on it, you can nuke the diagnostic partition and just use the
CD when you need diagnostics. I cloned the Vista partition on my
Dell laptop to an external drive, then nuked all the partitions on the
internal drive, then created an unformatted partition for Vista by using
Gparted from a live USB stick, then re-cloned the Vista partition onto
the newly created partition. Without the utilities partition, the recovery
partition, and the hellacious MediaDirect partition, I now have lots of
room for an installation of Ubuntu.

A convenient feature of Casper (the cloning utility that I use) is its
ability re-size a partition in the process of cloning by ignoring sectors
that contain no data. With that, I got the entire Vista partition down to
fitting in an 18GB partition. In transferring the clone back to the internal
hard drive, I used that feature in reverse to put the clone into a newly
created (unformatted) 100GB partition.

One thing to watch out for, though, is mixing your partition managers.
If your hard drive was partitioned by Vista's Disk Management or for
Vista by the PC manufacturer, you ought not use partitioning utilities
authored prior to Vista. The reason is that Vista uses a different data
offset from the start of the partitions that it makes. Vista can read
partitions from the old format, but old partition managers (i.e. all other
partition managers) cannot read Vista's format. This is especially
sensitive when dealing with removal or addition of selected logical drives
within an Extended partition. For background on this, read the section
on Vista's new partitioning rules from McTavish's treatise on multibooting:
http://www.multibooters.co.uk/partitions.html .
Also read these support pages by Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931854 ,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931760 .

On my new Dell laptop, I found (using Cute Partition Manager) that
the Vista partition's contents were offset according to the old format, but
the logical drive within the Extended partition was offset in the new Vista
way. So I used Gparted to nuke all the partitions except Vista's, then I
used Casper to clone Vista's partition to an external drive and then to
re-clone it to a new position (and used "bcdedit /rebuildbcd" to adjust the
BCD), and then used Gparted to create the new partitions for Ubuntu.
Now all the partitions are offset according to the old pre-Vista format,
and both the OSes are happy.

*TimDaniels*

 

[John John (MVP)]

Several different ways to find out from within Windows.

Using the Disk Mangement tool look at the colour bar of the partition,
primary partitions are a deep navy blue, logical drives are a light blue
surrounded by a smaller green border.

On the right click menu if you see an option to mark the partition
active it is a primary partition, if you see no such option it isn't.

Use the DiskPart utility at the Command Prompt, use the following
commands (for clarity the DiskPart commands are in UPPERCASE):

C:\>
C:\>DISKPART

Microsoft DiskPart version 5.1.3565

Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: YOUR-27E1513D96

DISKPART> LIST DISK

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ---------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 149 GB 0 B

DISKPART> SELECT DISK 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> LIST PARTITION

Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Primary 5544 MB 32 KB
Partition 2 Primary 144 GB 5544 MB

DISKPART>EXIT

Leaving DiskPart...

John

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Disk Management doesn't deall well with partition types that are
not NTFS or FATxx. The various proprietary Dell partition types
are portrayed by Disk Management as being Primary - even when
they are actually logical drives within an Extended partition, such
as used to house Dell's MediaDirect atrocity.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Bill in Co.]

The Dell Partition types are "DE" for the tiny utility partition near the
beginning of the HD, and "DB" for the larger DSR Restore partition near the
end of the HD, from what PM reports. And both are listed as Primary by
both PM, and Disk Management (where they show up as dark blue).

 

[Sal]

The Dell Partition types are "DE" for the tiny utility partition near the
beginning of the HD, and "DB" for the larger DSR Restore partition near the
end of the HD, from what PM reports.   And both are listed as Primary by
both PM, and Disk Management (where they show up as dark blue).





- Show quoted text -

It really burns me up that Dell would waste a primary partition on a
mere 16MB partition, only half of which is used (50% free). I'm using
XP Home and can't delete it using the Disk Management snap-in. Two
questions:
1. Can I delete it?
2. If I delete it and create other primary partitions greater than 16

 

[Sal]

It really burns me up that Dell would waste a primary partition on a
mere 16MB partition, only half of which is used (50% free). I'm using
XP Home and can't delete it using the Disk Management snap-in. Two
questions:
1. Can I delete it?
2. If I delete it and create other primary partitions greater than 16- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Continued (I accidentally hit send too soon):

2. If I delete it and create other primary partitions greater than
16MB, will that space go unused? If so how can I close the gap, so to
speak.

 

[Bill in Co.]

I wouldn't if I were you, unless you have a really pressing NEED to. Yes,
it is a bit annoying, however.

But there is still one available primary partition slot left (since 3 out of
4 are in use, including the one for Windows), and the fourth (if you created
it) could be used as an extended partition to put other logical partitions
into, like I have done over here.

So you probably don't need to delete it (either the Dell Diagnostics
partition or the Dell System Restore partition, either of which might come
in useful some day).

2. If I delete it and create other primary partitions greater than
16MB, will that space go unused? If so how can I close the gap, so to
speak.

You can use Partition Magic (e.g: version 8) to mess around with the
partitions like that, but as I said, unless you know exactly what you are
doing, I'd suggest that you leave them alone. For example, if you delete
the DSR (Dell System Restore) partition, you WILL have some problems booting
up!, because its expected to be there, as part of the Dell BIOS bootup
routines. (I'm not saying there isn't any way around that, but that's
another nother' story)

 

[Timothy Daniels]

And so, as I said, Disk Management reports them to be Primary.
What you may not see, unless you have a Dell laptop, is the
logical drive in the Extended partition, and that logical drive was
portrayed as a Primary partition by Disk Management in my Dell
Vista laptop, and as a logical drive in Cute Partition Manager, and
who knows what by Partition Magic. In my case, didn't even
try to delete any of them with Disk Management because I didn't
know exactly what DM would do with them, so I nuked 'em with
Gparted and created the partitions that I needed with Gparted,
knowing exactly what Gparted would create. The OP may have
better luck with XP's Disk Management, but he hasn't said anything
yet about the portrayal of the last partition (which is usually for
MediaDirect in Dell laptops).

*TimDaniels*

 

[John John (MVP)]

It really burns me up that Dell would waste a primary partition on a
mere 16MB partition, only half of which is used (50% free).

This is the service partition that is booted when you press the Function
key (F12 on Dell?) when your computer starts to boot. To be able to
boot the computer it has to be a primary partition. The other
alternative would be to have you use a diskette or a cd to boot the
computer.

John

 

[Bill in Co.]

This is the service partition that is booted when you press the Function
key (F12 on Dell?) when your computer starts to boot.