The 4 primary partition problem

People come to me with brand new laptops with an OEM installation of Win7 that have already 4 primary partitions. Those are usually:

1. A 100MB active boot partition that contains the MBR (Master Boot Record)
2. The OS partition that contains Windows7
3. The recovery partition
4. And often also a tools partition with the OEMs specific tool box

Since I always recommend to create a seperate Data Partition (but also warn them of the dreaded dynamic partitions), they ask me how to fiddle the Data partition in.

Now it is pretty obvious that #'s 1 and 3 must stay primaries because they are both boot partitions. But one should be able to change #'s 2 and 4 to logical partition (possible with Partition Wizard - at least the 4.2. edition). I wonder though how this creates an extended partition container.

Does anybody see any harm done if one converts #'s 2 and 4 into logical partitions and are there any interim steps required to get the container? (I hate to try it on someones laptop and create a mess). I believe that BFK already stated in one of his tuts that #2 is a candidate,

Hello WHS.



The Windows 7 Primary partition can be converted to an Extended partition, that will give you as many Logical drives for data as there are available drive letters; I feel that would be the best solution.



See Method Two of this tutorial at the link below.

Partition / Extended : Logical Drives








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Thanks guys for the wonderful suggestions. One problem I am facing is that the people I am dealing with are usually not very geeky. Repair installs and moving partitions around may scare them and I cannot hold their hand all the time. That's why I was looking for a simple cookbook approach that they could manage.

Converting primaries to logicals with Partition Wizard would be pretty easy. Questions are:

1. Is that possible when there are 4 primaries without running into the dynamics. How is the container created.
2. Can the the OS partition be converted if there is the 100MB active partition. I believe yes.
3. Is there really a need for the OEM tools partition to be a primary - this may though be different from OEM to OEM.

I think the iffy question is #1. If we will not find a conclusive answer, I will experiment with one of my own systems (after taking an image). That will not answer Q#3 because I have no such animal.

I'm setting it up in VirtualBox right now, to test converting an OS Primary to an Extended/Logical drive with the "System Reserved" present; I'll let you know how it goes when finished.

It's now about half-way through "Expanding Files"

Bare Foot Kid said:

I'm setting it up in VirtualBox right now, to test converting an OS Primary to an Extended/Logical drive with the "System Reserved" present; I'll let you know how it goes when finished.

It's now about half-way through "Expanding Files"

Thanks Ted

Partition Wizard does indeed make it easy to convert a partition from Primary to Logical. It would be a one step process to convert Partition #4 to logical. The extended would be created automatically.

If that is the case, we would be home free - and you would be my hero.

Ted is just now experimenting with it. Let's see whether he can confirm that.

Here you go Wolfgang!

Remember YMMV, what worked in VB on my desktop may not work on granny's lappy.

For those guests/visitors that may not know ... DO NOT attempt this if the new Windows 7 "System Reserved" partition is not present on your system, Windows will not boot/start if you do.

click to enlarge