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January 24th, 2009 12:00
Split C: to two drives
Hi,
I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Vista HP SP1 preloaded, bought off BestBuy. The laptop has one Toshiba 250 GB HDD that came partitioned into 4 primary partitions, one OS (C:) of size 225 GB, one recovery (D:) of 10 GB, one 2.5 GB partition and another 39 MB partition. All 4 show as Primary in Disk Management. When I select the C: and select Shrink Volume, select simple drive, a 58 GB portion is created and shows as un-allocated (with a black header). On trying to assign it a drive letter and format with NTFS (all default values), it fails.
Can someone give me an idea as to how can I create another data drive out of the 225 GB system partition ? I found a utility GParted that does it at boot time, but if Vista can do it, guess it is worth a try. I also read about that one disk can have at most 4 primary partitions. Is this the cause of failure ? How can it be overcome ?
Sandeep
TheRealFireblad
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4.6K Posts
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January 25th, 2009 05:00
Welcome to the forums :emotion-21:
You're unable to create another partition, because Dell systems can't (officially) have more than four partitions, unfortunately.
So you'd have to delete one of the default partitions, before you can create one of your own.
I say "officially", because... as another forum member found out recently... there is a way around it - using a program called 'BootIt NG' (Next Generation).
He used it (successfully) to create an extra partition for Windows 7 Beta on his Dell laptop.
You obviously use it at your own risk though :emotion-55:
msgale
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2.5K Posts
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January 25th, 2009 09:00
Officially the limit is four primary partitions. An extended paretition is a primary partition. If you convert the 2.5 GByte partition to an extended partition you will be able to create logical disk in it, but that would be the same as deleting it. I have no idea what the 2.5 GByte partition is, the 34 MByte partition my be for Dell Diagnostics.
Sandeep.Bhattac
3 Posts
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January 25th, 2009 09:00
Hi,
Thanks for the update. I tried deleting the fourth partition (the one with 2.5 GB capacity), but got a message that it is not a Windows partition, do you want to delete it anyway ? I did not, since I was not sure. What is this partition for ? I understand that the 34 MB portion is used by Vista during installation akin to a 8 MB reserved by XP. Is this correct ? What then is this 2.5 GB partition for ?
Can I convert this 2.5 Gb partition from a Primary one to an extended one ? In that case, I could shrink the C: partition and add it to the logical drive on the extended partition ? Please advise.
Sandeep
Sandeep.Bhattac
3 Posts
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January 25th, 2009 10:00
Thanks for the reply.
The Disk Mgmt reports the 39 Mb partition as Healthy (EISA Configuration), the D: partition as (Primary) (this is labelled Recovery) , the C: as Healthy(system, Pagefile,bootfile,etc......), and the 2.5 GB as Healthy (Primary) in that order from left to right. All are Healthy with a blue header (primary partition).
Can I delete the 2.5 GB partition ? Does anyone have a similar configuration from Dell ? This is an Inspiron 1525 15.4" T5800/ 3 GB / 250 GB Toshiba HDD laptop with a 2 MP webcam and DELL Wireless 1395 card, a 5-in-1 card reader, HDMI, etc etc... (Inspiron 1525-140B). It came with Vista HP SP 1 preloaded.
Sandeep
Larry R
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1.7K Posts
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January 27th, 2009 11:00
The way hard drives are read to, you can have at most 4 primary partitions. This is not a Dell thing, but industry standard. As MSGale states, you would need to remove one of the existing primary partitions, create an extended partition and then creation one (or more) logical partitions inside that extended partition in order to create new one(s).
The partitions Dell put on the drive are going to be:
While it is recommended that you keep the diagnostics partition, it will not cause a problem to remove it. The same is true for the Image Restore partition. Obviously you can't use it to recover the system back to the factory install if you remove it, however. You won't be able to use Dell Media Direct if you remove that partition.
jbachman53
6 Posts
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March 2nd, 2009 08:00
I have the same configuration on a M1530 which I just bought. I have made a complete disk image (all 4 partitions) on a USB drive (with a copy on my old desktop for insurance).
If I wanted to now delete the recovery partition to open up an additional partition, it seems to me that worst case I could roll back the system to the original 4 partitions to run the recovery. Not sure if I would ever need to do this since the image files on the USB drive contain the "as shipped" system configured on drive C.
Does this make sense? Is it fairly safe now to delete the recovery partition?