Unwanted unallocated space when creating a partition.

I've spent more than a little time recently setting up the hard disk on my new Dell laptop which is running Vista Home Premium.
I initially tried using Vista's disk management tools but that had serious limitations so I moved on to Disk Director. I have noticed that when I create a new partition some free space (approx 6.99 MB) is also created at the beginning, between the new partition & the previous partition. This free space only shows up in Disk Director, it does not appear in Vista's disk management tool.
Does anyone know why this free space is created or how to prevent it?
Thanks.

 

The partition you created with DD is cylinder aligned and it may start up to 7 MB after the end of a Vista partition. Vista created partitions aren't cylinder aligned. Divide the number of sectors in a Vista partition by 2048. The answer will be an integer.

 

Brian,

Many thanks for the information - most helpful

 

Skyrideruk,

Do you have a Dell Diagnostic partition at the start of the HD? It's probably cylinder aligned with a 63 sector offset. A legacy partition. If so there will be a sector gap between the end of this partition and the start of the Vista partition. But less than 1 MB (less than 2048 sectors) as the Vista partition has a 2048 sector offset. Actually the offset is 2048 times an integer (2048 sector blocks).