Partitioning- error

I have a 250Gb HDD on my brand new netbook running win 7 starter.

Here are my current partitions:
-SYSTEM 199Mb NTFS
-C: 218Gb NTFS
-RECOVERY 14Gb NTFS
-HP TOOLS 118Mb FAT

I want another partition to put a linux distro on... for messing around.

I can successfully shrink the c volume, and have an unallocated space volume of xxGb.

Then I right click the unallocated space and select "create simple volume" and select a drive letter and name for it and NTFS.

When I click OK, I get a message saying that the operation will convert the selected basic disk to a dynamic disk.

then i click ok

then i get an error message saying dynamic disks are not supported by my OS...

Any ideas? Thanks.

Are you partitioning from Linux or Win7?

Can you select a file format other than NTFS. I did something similar on an external hard drive back in February. I was having problems with my internal one and the first person I talked to at Dell said that I couldn't get a replacement with my five year warranty until the current one failed completely (it has been resolved since). Being a full time college student I can't just go 3 days or more with no computer so I installed Ubuntu on my 1TB external. If I remember correctly I left the space unpartitioned until I loaded up Linux and formatted it from there. Even if you did make it NTFS, Linux uses a different file system that Windows does not recognize, so you'd have to reformat the partition anyways.

I have win 7 currently installed. Here is a prt sc of my disk management.

ryo said:

hello and welcome polomaan,
what software you're using to format??
can you take snapshot of your disk management?? at disk management, you can format direct it from there, due your information, you already shrink the drive and got unallocated space. so you can format the that's space with disk management.just right click on it.

from my original post:

"Then I right click the unallocated space and select "create simple volume" and select a drive letter and name for it and NTFS.

When I click OK, I get a message saying that the operation will convert the selected basic disk to a dynamic disk.

then i click ok

then i get an error message saying dynamic disks are not supported by my OS..."

Petey7 said:

Can you select a file format other than NTFS. I did something similar on an external hard drive back in February. I was having problems with my internal one and the first person I talked to at Dell said that I couldn't get a replacement with my five year warranty until the current one failed completely (it has been resolved since). Being a full time college student I can't just go 3 days or more with no computer so I installed Ubuntu on my 1TB external. If I remember correctly I left the space unpartitioned until I loaded up Linux and formatted it from there. Even if you did make it NTFS, Linux uses a different file system that Windows does not recognize, so you'd have to reformat the partition anyways.

I get the exact same error messages as i posted in my original post by trying to format the unalocated space as FAT32.

ok, thx. i'll give them a try :)