How to partition drive in Vista?

For my experince with this process, you can only give back that free space to the volume it came from.  You can not create a new partition from that space.

 

If it had been free space created during the install process, then you could od it.

 

Make sense?

I'd like to elaborate on jmwills' response. You can give unallocated space to the volume directly to the left of the free space.

 

For example, in this case, you could delete the OS (C: ) volume (although you'll lose your OS if you remove that specific one) and all the free space would then be available to the Recovery (D: ) volume, which could also be deleted to make that first 16 MB partition quite large. Additionally, you could also delete the 2.00 GB partition at the end to extend the OS (C: ) volume even further, or stick another drive in there in combination with shrinking OS (C: ).

 

Anyways, back to your question: On a basic disk, you can only have a maximum of 4 simple volumes. Normally any extra volumes would just be created on an extended partition, of which you can have as many as we'll need for our purposes, but since we have that 2.00 GB MediaDirect partition on the end of the drive we can't do that. We have a few options here

-upgrade the entire disk to a dynamic disk (only the current boot volume will be bootable)

-delete one of the basic volumes to allow for one more

-delete the 2 GB MediaDirect partition at the end of the drive to allow us to use extended partitions

The easiest soultion, buy Partiton Magic.

Nothing will work for your problem.

 

Basic Disk Partitioning:

1. You can only have FOUR primary partitions on a physical hard drive.

2. You already have Four primary partitions.

3. You are trying to create a Fifth.

6. It will not let you.

 

If you delete one of the primaries then you will be able to either create a Primary Partition, or an Extended partition and create as many logical drives inside the extended that you desire.

 

pcgeek11

how do you create the logical drive in vista ?

It happens more or less automatically, it's just like creating another partition. In this case, you'll have to delete the MediaDirect partition first (NOT recommended).

Penquins (or anyone),

 

You said its not recommended to delete the MediaDirect partition (the 2Gig partition). Why is that? I don't use the Media Direct, nor plan on using it.

 

Thanks,

jzcombo

If you don't plan on using Media Direct, deleting the partition won't have any adverse effects, but if you decide you want it back, it requires a full reformat of the whole drive, that's why I advise people to avoid deleting it.