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Changing C: partition (Boot) from Primary to Extended
Hello,
(yes I know, "yet another one on this subject" , but please bear with me...)
I am trying to create logical drives, and to that end have to turn a primary partition into an extended one.
Currently I have four Primary partitions (yes, you see it coming... ):
*: SYSTEM (no drive letter, marked System, Active),
C: (no name; marked Boot, Page File, Crash Dump),
D: Recovery, and
*: HP_TOOLS (no drive letter)
I am following (of course) the excellent and rightly famous tutorial here,
and I have to use "Method Two", because I am in exactly the situation described there, namely that the manufacturer (HP) greedily has created four primary partitions already, so that I cannot simply add another one. (And I don't want to touch, let alone delete, SYSTEM and/or Recovery).
The problem is that I was trying to use not the Partition Wizard mentioned in the tutorial, but a similar tool called EaseUS Partition Master.
However, when I told it to turn the Primary C: partition into an Extended one, it refused on the good grounds that this is the Boot partition and can therefore not be touched.
It makes sense, and I am "almost" certain I understand the reason, but before I do something stupid*, I'd like to have this confirmed by someone who knows this stuff better...
(My confusion stems from the idea, apparently wrong, that Active partition means the same as Boot partition; so with SYSTEM as the Active partition, I was kind of surprised to find that actually C: is Boot.)
Questions:
1. The essential difference seems to be that EaseUS Partition Master is run within a "normal" Win7 session (i.e. having booted from the hard drive), whereas for using the Partition Master (as per the tutorial) one apparently must boot from a CD.
Is this understanding correct?
2. Does that mean that the C: partition in the latter case (booting from CD) is not the Boot partition, and therefore can be changed to Extended (without reformatting, of course)?
3. When I afterwards boot "normally" from the hard disk again, will C: then operate OK as Boot partition (or rather volume now) again, even though it is now a logical volume on an Extended partition?
(This is the question that worries me slightly. There are numerous threads here about this "all primary partitions taken" issue, and I must have read them all; but I couldn't find a clear answer to this last question.)
All this is actually made rather clear in the tutorial, at least implicitly (see e.g. the last screenshot, under Step 4 of Method Two); but I'd still appreciate some explicit confirmation.
It's not my own laptop I am setting up, you see, and I'd hate to mess it up...
Many thanks for your time and help!
Cheers,
tronje
* I do already have (via MacriumReflect) an image of all partitions, plus the corresponding boot CD, though