Partitioning problem

SIW2 said:

Uh oh.


You can't do that with the XP cd - at least not without deleting the extended partition and getting into a serious data recovery situation.

Hello SIW2 sir,
It's a humble presentation to you From Arc.
I am a great fan of you. I honor your supreme knowledge and respect your extremely high efficiency. I always follow your posts and tutorials; I learned a lot from those, and still doing so. I also remember that when I was a newbie, I exited Installation & Setup - Windows 7 Forums forum at your one word. Returned there after a long gap.

But sir, at the present issue, what I am saying is possible. Let me prove it. It is my disk management window. In disk 0, win 7 is installed in the primary partitions, and in disk 1, in the primary partitions, there are linux and swap for linux. I am planning to delete first three partitions (two primary and one logical extended) using XP cd.

So I booted from XP cd, and it is the disk info as per the XP cd (I detouched the disk 0 earlier, hence G,H,I and J is shown as C,D,E and F)

Deleted C, I and J (I an J are primary, as linux were there, the format is said unknown there) and got the total free space as unpartitioned, as per the image below

Now created a new partition there in the free space, formatted the partition using XP cd, exited from installation, attached disk 0 again and took the disk management screenshot which is this


So I if can , why anyone else cannot?
Sir, please dont take it otherwise. I just tried to justified myself. ( and in this process I lost my nice beloved Ubuntu linux installation.)
Hope you will accept my words. Waiting for your opinion in this regard.

That Disk 1 is confusing me - from the colours, it looks like there are primary partitions and logical volumes inside an Extended partition.

Perhaps Disk Management is showing them as primary as it cannot recognise what they really are. What file system did they have on them?

Actually Disk 1 was 58 GB primary. It was a XP installation. Later I deleted XP and installed Ubuntu there, but not as dual boot (Thanks to Robert and Gladson! They helped me so much then). When I installed Ubuntu there, I used only 8 GB for Ubuntu, and formtted the rest 50 GB as logical. I did that using PW, coz at that time I came to know about PW from Gregrocker, and I was to experiment that tool

My experience regarding partitioning of hds using xp cd says that it is possible (at least I did it various times in my machine, before Dec 2009). What I noticed that when you delete a partition (previously created with xp) , it creates free unallocated space; whatever the character of the partition may be, primary or extended. then if two partitions are deleted, you have the unallocated space in aggregate . Now it is just to create a new partition there.

EDIT : I cannot do the same thing using Win 7 DVD. It creates two unallocated spaces for two types of partitions (again saying, it is my experience, not claiming it to be universal.).

SIW2 said:

Did you notice if that is the same if the volumes you deleted are not next to each other ?

Are you then able to create one partition from the two separated areas of free/unallocated space?

To do that , the XP partitioner would have to non -destructively move all the data in the first and second logical drives 10gb ( to the right as seen in Disk Management view)

Sorry, I didnot want to delete anymore data, So I experimented that by creating another logical volume through shrinking one logical partition; and tried to merge it with the primary partition.

I tried all possible processes to do so (other than using Acronis, which I almost dont touch nowadays, coz it does everything automatically, and I dont get any chance to learn the actual situation); but failed every time. Neither xp cd nor 7 dvd nor PW (and GParted) could manage the merger. When both the primary partition and the newly created logical volume both are deleted, the free spaces are shown separately .

So it stands that I was wrong.

gregrocker said:

You would first need to convert the logical to Primary (or vice versa) using Partition Wizard>Modify before deleting. This makes the Unnallocated Space (if Primary) or Free Space (with logical) the same to merge.

Then if there is a remaining partition in the way, you righclick>Resize that partition and drag it as a whole over to the right or left so that the empty spaces merge.

Sorry, Still they were displayed separately, may be it is due to I created that logical volume out of another logical partition.

Greg, I want to know something from you. I want to install XP in my disk 1 (screenshot in n earlier post) by getting a 10 gb partition out of G, but in such a manner that the xp partition would not be visible in Win 7, and obviously not as dual boot. As I do experiments with my computer now and then, If 7 corrupts I can be in my work thus.