Can I Reduce the Number of Primary Partitions?

I have no idea if Linux will run from an extended partition.

But you can get rid of that recovery partition if you have no intention of ever using it or if you have made a set of recovery disks that serve the same purpose.

And you can get rid of that system reserved partition if you first move your boot files from it to C.

Thanks for the reply. I plan to back my system up once again before removing the recovery partition at the beginning of the drive. Now a new question arises.

Can I install Linux in the empty space infront of system reserve partition or does the system reserve have to come before any other data partition ( I think I read somewhere it does or usually does, but am not too sure if it is a must )?
This way I can reclaim the unallocated space at the end my hard drive, and not have two seperate partitions.

I have no idea if Linux will run from an extended partition.

I've read on other forums that it is possible.

paoiue said:

Thanks for the reply. I plan to back my system up once again before removing the recovery partition at the beginning of the drive. Now a new question arises.

Can I install Linux in the empty space infront of system reserve partition or does the system reserve have to come before any other data partition

As far as I know, the system reserved does not have to be first.

At any rate, you could use a program such as Partition Wizard bootable disk to get all of that unallocated space in one spot and generally manipulate partitions as needed.

I don't think that Disk Management is necessarily an accurate representation of where stuff is located on your hard drive anyway.

I have already looked into using VirtualBox. I tried running Fedora on VB, but I experienced a lot of lag. When I checked task manager, 76% of my RAM was being used. When I close VB, it drops back down to about 45%-50%. Having it run at a constant 76% is higher than I'm comfortable with. Also, a friend told me that he has seen computers fry because it was running a virutal OS. Since I will be using it for extended periods of time each day, I didn't really want to risk frying my laptop.

With VB, Gnome3 doesn't work properly, so instead I'm using XFCE. I tried using both Virtual Box and VMware player, but both times it was a lot smoother when I ran the live CD off a usb. It also uses atleast 70% of my RAM even when pretty much idle. I have tried leaving the amount of RAM at the default 700 something Mb after setting it to 1Gb the first few times I tried ( I was following some tutorials ), but it remains over 70%. I'm not sure if I should be going under 700Mb of RAM because I will be running a few other programs when I get it to work. That's why I would prefer to be able to dual boot and just run one OS at a time.

Also after using Partition Wizard, I found that that 16Gb space actually has 10Gb of data in it (see below).


This is what the partiton contained.


The data in there looks important, so I don't know if I can delete that now.
If I were to move my boot files to my C:\ drive, how would I accomplish that?
Or would changing my D:\ to a logical partition and installing Linux there be a better option? Assuming that it will not affect my system.