Extended partitions

Discussion in 'Acronis Disk Director Suite' started by Howard Kaikow, Jul 23, 2009.

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  1. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    How does one create Extended partitions with Acronis disk Director?

    I sure hope that one does not have to use the Disk Editor to create an Extended partition from within ADD.
     
  2. Earthling

    Earthling Registered Member

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    You choose Primary or Logical when setting it up. Logical = Extended.
     
  3. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Disk Director creates an extended partition container for logical partitions but does not show it in their graphical views. You can see it if you view the disk with Windows Disk Management.

    Be aware that with Disk Director you can produce a partition structure that mixes primary and logical partitions, unlike Windows tools. For example, you can have: [Primary 1][Logical 1][Primary 2][Primary 3][Logical 2][Logical 3]...

    Windows will happily accept a layout like this, but Windows Disk Management will display it incorrectly because it expects all of the logical partitions to be adjacent to each other. Layouts that mix primary and logical partitions will produce some rather strange-looking displays when viewed by Windows Disk Management, but Disk Director will show them correctly.
     
  4. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    I have not found any reason to use a Primary partition for other than the partition in which NTLDR resides, i.e., the C drive.
     
  5. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    I used to feel the same until after helping a few forum members recover from disk failures. The starting and ending sectors of a primary partition are listed in the partition table, so they are easy to find (and back up). The start and end sectors of a logical partition are stored in the previous and current logical partition. Logical partitions are then strung together in a chain, with the current logical partition pointing to the location of the next logical, etc.

    This is not an issue until you have disk problems (caused by either software or hardware). Let's say, for example, that you have six logical partitions. Something happens on your disk to corrupt logical partition 3. The result is a corrupted logical 3 partition and an inability to find logical partitions 4, 5, and 6. They are still on the disk, but it may take forensic tools to recover them.

    I've since gotten in the habit of using primary partitions and only using logicals when the number of partitions exceeds four.
     
  6. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    Can ADD convert logical partitions to primary partitions?
    Can ADD convert ext3 and Linux sawp partitions to primary partititions?
    And, can ADD do so, if the partitions were originally created by Partition Magic?
     
  7. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    I Just used PM to convert a partition from logical to primary,
    It seemed to do so, as Windows Disk Management labels the partition as primary.
    But, at tge end of the process, RM issued an error that said somthin glike the file system was not supported. It's NTFS.

    What do I have to do to make sure the partition is OK?
     
  8. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Yes, quite simple to do. If I have 4 primary partitions and want to add another partition, I just convert primary 4 to a logical partition and go from there.

    The format of the partition is irrelevant. So yes, if there is room in the partition table for primary partitions you can convert existing logical partitions to primary. One caution here about ext3 partitions - the current version of ADD will not create ext2 or ext3 partitions with 256-byte inode sizes. A lot of the latest Linux distros are switching to inode-256. ADD will create inode-128 (the existing standard) partitions. Since inode-256 is becoming so popular, and since Acronis has added support for inode-256 in the latest versions of TrueImage 2009, I would expect that inode-256 will be supported in the next version of ADD.

    Yes. I started with ADD maybe 4 years ago and at the time my disk's partitions had been created by PM. ADD had no trouble with the partition structure. I would exercise care going the other way, however. PM will certainly complain if you try to use it on a layout where all of the logical partitions are not adjacent to one another. ADD can easily create such a layout (as can Linux), but PM will complain.
     
  9. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    If it shows up in Disk Management properly and if chkdsk does not find any errors then it's probably OK. Remember that PM is now a very old program and some of the changes and additions to the NTFS file system were not even around when PM was written.
     
  10. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    Thanx, I'll convert 3 of my 4 hard drives to use all primary partitioms, but I won't touch the ext3 and linux swap.

    The 4th drive has 5 logical partitions, I-M, with my main OS on J.
    And, there's no wiggle room to re-arrange the order, so I guess the first 4 could become primary, and the last, a FAT32 shared with linux, will remain logical. All other logical drives are NTFS,
     
  11. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Remember that there are only 4 "slots" in the partition table and the extended partition container occupies one slot. So you can have either 1 to 4 primary partitions only, or 1 to 3 primary partitions plus an unlimited number of logical partitions.
     
  12. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    I forgot to menton that the system on which I am talking about converting logical to physical partitions is Windows 2000., and PM 8 claims to support Windows 2000.

    I've lost faith in PM due to the problem I described in https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=248548.

    I purchased ADD for use on a Vista notebook. The notebook currently has only C and D drives, where D is the recovery drive.

    I am going to shrink C to make room for Windows 7, a user partition, and, likely, 4 linux partitions (swap, /, /home, and /opt)

    I also downloaded the GParted LiveCD, but there's a recent discussion that implies that there could be a problem using the LiveCD on some HP Pavilion computers, of which my Vista system is one such critter.

    I am considering ditching PM on the Windows 2000/Linux desktop, and just using the GParted LiveCD.
     
  13. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    Ayup, that's what I intended to do, I misspoke in my previous posting.
     
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