Partitioning a Hard Drive-Vista HP

[Guest]

After having successfully partitioned hard drives on two Toshiba machines, I
cannot do so on a Dell. The error message "insufficient disk space" is
obviously not the real problem on a brand new computer with only the
operating system and craplets. Is it true that currently Vista only supports
4 partitions and if Dell has set them up for Recovery, Media Direct and EISA,
that I cannot partition further as certain Web postings suggest? I can get
as far as shrinking the c drive, but cannot assign a letter or quick format
as Microsoft instructions specifiy. Is there a work around?

 

[Richard Urban]

You can have only 4 primary partitions per drive. It is inherent of PC
architecture. If one of those 4 partitions is setup as a primary extended
partition, you can create logical partitions within (up to the end of the
alphabet - using any letter designation not used by other primary
partitions).

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[Guest]

Three of the 4 are called primary partitions, one is called EISA. How do I
find out if they are "extended"...I guess I know C is not even tho it is the
one with 120G since I could shrink and create unallocated--but not assign a
drive letter. Does Dell set the "extended" characteristic or can I? (1.5hr on
typing chat with Dell...without resolution)

 

[John Barnes]

In Disk Management, you can find out quickly if your partitions are primary
or extended with logical drives. You can only have a maximum of 4 primary,
3 if you want an extended, on any one drive. Since they are all used by
Dell, you would not be able to add another partition. You may be able to
add another logical drive if the EISA partition is extended. You will
probably need to use a third party partitioning program as it would be very
difficult if not impossible to rearrange the freespace.