More on Extended Partitions...

I was fortunate to read a recent thread about extended partitions in ADD 10 (2160):

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=248765)

In this thread, K0LO explains that "with Disk Director you can produce a partition structure that mixes primary and logical partitions...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."

This was a great relief to me, because after working with ADD recently, I booted back into Windows XP and got the shock of my life when I viewed my partitions in Disk Management!

Dispensing with the whole back story, here is where I'm at now: I have two internal hard disks. The first disk has two partitions - a system partition and a data partition. The second disk is one big extended partition which includes a logical partition at the beginning of the disk followed by free space. I want to create a primary partition out of the free space, into which I will install the Windows 7 RC. The Win 7 installer will setup a dual boot with Windows XP.

Do I somehow 'shrink' the extended partition to make room for my primary partition? Or do I just create my primary partition in the free space and let ADD worry about shrinking the extended partition?

Thanks for your help.

 

Bulldog:

You can simply create a primary partition in the unallocated space. When you install Win7, let the installer do a quick format of the partition even if you have already formatted it when setting it up with DD.

 

Thank you - again.

This will be my second try at installing the Win 7 RC. The first try failed after a few days due to file corruption in the Win 7 partition. I subsequently learned that XP and Win 7 have slightly different file structures. It was possibly my mistake in allowing Windows XP's CHKDSK to fix 'errors' in the Win 7 partition that doomed my Win 7 install.

 

Bulldog:

Probably what happened is that you created the partitions with DD and did not allow the Win7 installer to format them. The corruption problem has been reported by other DD users. Formatting the partition via a quick format by the Win7 installer will avoid that issue.

 

I understand and will do.

And right you are...I did create the empty partition into which I installed Win 7 with Disk Director.