7.844mb Unallocated space on drives

I have 6 hard drives on my system and when I open Disk Director it shows 7.844mb of unallocated space at the beginning of each drive. I tried resizing the partition to include the space but it won't let me. I'm sure there is something I'm doing wrong but am stumped, Would appreciate any assistance. Thanks

 

catman915,

Is the unallocated space followed by a primary or an extended partition?

http://www.bootitng.com/kb/article.php?id=274

 

It is followed by an extended Partition.

 

Then it is normal and it can't be removed. Extended partitions must start on a cylinder boundary.

Edit: The 7.844 MB of unallocated space can be used, if you like. You can create a primary FAT partition and install DOS. But you will need a good boot manager to boot DOS from a HD which isn't HD0.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

The 7.8 mb partition is created automatically whenever the 1st partition is not an active primary partition.

You can merge that 7.8mb partition with an adjoining active primary partition. I did it recently. But usually it's best to do it on a new hard drive or a recently formatted hard drive.

Having the 7.8mb partition will not affect the hard drive, but I always remove them from my hard drives to make them neater.

 

I have six drives and I'm under the impression that you can only have 4 Primary partitions on one machine under windows. Is this correct or could I make all six Primary?

 

The four primary partition limitation applies to each hard drive, not to your computer. It relates to the four available slots in the partition table of the MBR on each HD. An extended partition can occupy one of the four slots.

Functionally it doesn't matter how you fill the slots but if an OS isn't needed on the HD, I prefer an extended partition as you have chosen. It can contain multiple logical volumes if you desire.

 

Thanks Brian. I think I'll leave it as is and ignore the 7mb UA space.

 

Exactly what I'd do. What's an 8 MB loss in 500,000 MB?