Windows 7: Windows 7 200MB Partition

Hello all....

I wanted to start a dialog about this but I didn't want to do it in other people's threads. Not to mention; having one place to figure this out.

I would like to know if this will affect how many "Primary Partition(s)" as opposed to "Extended Partition / Logical Drive(s)" are created in the normal course of creating partitions / drives. As I understand it; only three "Primary Partitions" can be created on any one HDD; any other partitions created must be an "Extended Partition"; which can't host the active boot files of the OS. This of course; in turn, limits the amount of drives that can host an OS on a HDD.

Where all this is leading: If Windows 7 creates this 200MB Partition as the first partition on the HDD; then that will limit how many (to two) partitions that are left to host an OS on that HDD. Now I know that few people dual boot; let alone multi boot on a single HDD.

I just wanted to hear what thoughts y'all have about this.


Later Ted

It's actually four primary partitions, but yeah.

multi-booting is just silly in my opinion. Plus who needs to dual-boot with Windows 7 on a single HDD, when you can just boot from a VHD?

Example pics:

Hello x3haloed.

Not according to this.




Later Ted

lol, I don't see how that picture proves anything.


I'll post a VHD with 4 primary partitions if you like :P

This pissed me off, because now I can't use TrueCrypt

why not?

TrueCrypt refuses to install WDE on any drive unless the Windows partition is the one that it boots from. Since Windows 7 boots from this 200MB partition, I cannot do it

That's unfortunate. I would guess that they will update it to work with the new partition scheme at some point

Yeah, multibooting is silly, especially when dealing with a *pre-BETA* OS - so if the OS goes south, you can still boot your VHDs, right?

feh. Nice try. Remember it has to be a Virtual PC created VHD - Steve has been trying to get VMs from others to work and thus far ain't getting too far. I am pretty positive that VBox images don't work at the moment....

Windows only allows 4 primary partitions *or* 3 primary partitions and 1 Extended partition. Logical partitions are created inside of the extended partitions and are numbered 5+. Although the extended partition is not a physically accessible partition in and of itself, it is still (unofficially) using one of the 4 primary partition numbers.

This is the way it has always been - even in *nix. Create 4 primary partitions, or create 3 primary, 1 extended, and all subsequent logical partitions inside the extended.


Please do - and then create an extended partition *after* having 4 primary partitions.

And before you run screaming back to me about you were only talking about 4 primary partitions, please *re-read* what Ted wrote in the very first post.