Creating additional partition makes all partitions non-bootable

I wanted to steal a bit of HD space and make it into an extra partition for storing data, so I used Disk Management to shrink the system partition, then reallocated the free space as a new drive. Everything looked as it should, except that Windows warned me that formatting my new partition would make ALL partitions "simple" and that none of them would then be bootable, apart from the Win 7 system partition.

The computer as such still works OK, but the functionality of system backups has been impaired. Norton Ghost now greys out the destination drive and therefore won't do a partition restore. Computer maker's factory reset stops with an error message. Windows 7's own complete system image restore stops with an error, but mercifully it still works if I run it from the Win7 Repair Disk. I haven't tested it but I expect Ghost would also work if I told it to retore the disk rather than just the partition. But both those methods overwrite the whole shebang.

Is there any way of creating a working data partition that doesn't nobble booting from existing partitions? I want to be able to restore just the system partition without wiping out my data.

Welcome to the forum can you post a screen shot showing all the details of your drive from diskmangment so we can see you may have created a none primary partition

Thanks, I'll do the snapshot ASAP. Meanwhile, I'm sure I did create it as non-primary, or "simple" as Win7 called it. There was no choice for primary. From memory I'm pretty sure there were 4 partitions already, and I think I read that it'll only make the first 4 primary.

Yes you can only have 4 primary on a MBR drive so you may have created a extended one

You may have converted the disk to dynamic to get the extra partition.

Here's the screenshot of Disk Management, with the warning when I try to format the new partition after allocating it. You're correct about it making them dynamic. But it won't do it without.

You covered the details with the message. The best bet is to delete the last up partition copy data of if you want. Then move the other hp to the right were the other partition was then you can create a primary partition in the free space. You better using free partition software as it's more friendly

Thanks, so I have to delete a partition to avoid exceeding the limit. This is a newly-purchased second hand computer, and I'm new to Win 7, so it's hard for me to know which is the least important existing partition and what I'd be losing. Samuria, I guess you mean the E: partition (HP Tools)? I'd best look in the manuals and see if it's got anything worth keeping it for. The D: partition is probably HP's factory reset volume. SIW2, I have no clue what the leftmost 300mb system partition is for. I get that if I delete it I must make the C: drive the system partition. Any idea what the benefit of the 300mb partition is?

SIW2 said:

You need a 3rd party partition manager to do number 2 . You also need to do it from outside windows. I suggest you d/l Aomei free (standard) partition assistant. Get it to make bootable media. Boot that up and make the changes I just described.

Or, you can borrow my boot media that already includes Aomei and other free tools:
A23x86.iso

That's kind of you, I'll take a look.