Disk Management Bug with Ext3 Partitions

publius · 25 Jun 2011

I've just ran into what appears to be a bug with Disk Management under Win7. THe problem seems to go back all the way to OS reporting themselves as NT 5.2 or greater. XP x64 has the problem, Win2K3 server does and Windows 7 does. I don't have any version of Vista to check, so I don't know for sure but I'd bet its there as well. THe 32-bit version of XP which reports itself as NT 5.1 doesn't have the problem.

At any rate, the problem is Disk Management seems to count all Linux partitions as primary, even those which are logical volumes inside extended partitions on MBR drives. As such, if this erroneous count exceeds 4, it will refuse to create any more primary partitions, even though there are less than 4 actual partitions in the MBR table.

I would appreciate it if any of you here who dual boot with Linux could confirm this behavior. I've reported it on some of the MS forums, but no one seems to be interested.

logicearth · 26 Jun 2011

Seeing as Microsoft does not support Linux...nope not a bug.

BriceH · 26 Jun 2011

As logicearth said, Microsoft doesn't support Linux. In fact, I think that the only formats that the disk manager will recognize are NTFS and FAT. That means that if you are dual-booting with either Linux (Ext4) or Mac OS X (HFS+), you're out of luck.

You can, however, use a partition manager called Partition Wizard. I haven't yet found a format that it doesn't recognize, and it works great.

publius · 26 Jun 2011

Actually, I would consider it a bug, because it prevents proper functionality of Windows itself, where you can't create any more primary partitions because of the erroneous primary partition count. It's not a matter of supporting or even recognizing Ext3/4 partitions, just properly assessing the disk layout to allow one to create and manage Window's own partitions.

Again, XP 32-bit doesn't suffer from the problem, it's only the later versions where this bug was introduced.