partition ...arrangement ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter RJK
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R

RJK

I don't know how the 7.8mb unallocated space got there, (at the front end of
my 2nd, slave, hd),
but, any ideas on how best to get rid of it, ...or just leave it there ?
http://www.rk73.wanadoo.co.uk/
I don't like the idea of having a dynamically allocated drive letter that
comes after the others, and then merging it with another drive, leaving that
space not really at the end of the drive, if u c wot i mean :-)

regards, Richard
 
It is reserved by the computer for the system. If you create fat32
partitions I don't believe this small partition is created (could be wrong
here - long time since I used fat32).

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard :-)

If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
thanx, ...I suspect you're on the right track there, months ago my drives
were all FAT32, then, I used BootItNG's "shunt everything up a bit," on all
drives, (to get some sort of optimum adjustment somewhere - was it cluster
size?), and then converted them all to NTFS. Obviously it's not doing any
harm but, every couple of months I have a rummage around, and do a bit of
tidying up, and every time I notice this 7.8mb "unallocated space," at the
front end of that hard disk. And if memory serves, I think I had a hard
drive in the past that I changed to slave, and that had the same thing.

regards, Richard
 
Have only seen this unallocated space when creating a lone FAT 32 extended
partition on a hard disk. This unallocated space is not visible with fdisk.
Its an offset required for the extended partition so the MBR will point to
the right location of the extended partition at bootup.
The MBR tells the PC the location of each primary partition during the boot
process. In the primary partition category, an extended partition is
considered a primary partition for this purpose. The dos logical drives
within the extended partition have their location information in the
extended partition.
To answer your question regarding the unallocated space, just leave it
alone.
 
I have this small partition on 4 hard drives in my main computer. All the
drives are formatted NTFS. Never had fat32 on any of them.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard :-)

If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
RJK said:
I don't know how the 7.8mb unallocated space got there, (at the front end
of my 2nd, slave, hd),
but, any ideas on how best to get rid of it, ...or just leave it there ?
http://www.rk73.wanadoo.co.uk/
I don't like the idea of having a dynamically allocated drive letter that
comes after the others, and then merging it with another drive, leaving
that space not really at the end of the drive, if u c wot i mean :-)

regards, Richard
Click to expand...


Richard:
In response to a query similar to yours, the following posting was made to
one of the XP newsgroups (not sure if it was this particular one) a few
months ago...

"That 8 MB partition is auto-created to handle dynamic disk information.
When a disk is converted to dynamic in the Disk Management snapin,
information regarding the configuration and any dependencies (e.g. software
RAID) are stored on disk at the end of the drive. This is how a drive can
be moved from one dynamic disk array to another and be recognized as
foreign drive.

Best regards,

Mike Truitt
Microsoft Corporation"
 
Wasn't explaining everyone's situation, only mine. These partitions were
created with Partition Magic from a dos boot diskette. XP wasn't involved.
However, XP has no problem with these partitions. Same for multiple
physical drives having same extended partition layout.
I found by trial and error that if I provide 3 primary partitions, and one
extended partition, that the 7 MB empty space was not present. If two
primary partitions or less, this space always preempts the extended
partition.
I like your snippet, but I do know what I've typed.
 
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