Creating / Converting Partitions in Vista

I am running Vista Home in a new Dell desktop machine. The machine came with the following partitions:

EISA - Primary
C (OS) - Primary
D (Recovery) - Logical

I used DDS10 and made the following changes:

EISA - Primary (no change)
C (OS) - Primary (changed size only)
D (Applications) - Primary (new)
E (Recovery) - Logical (changed drive letter)
G (Data) - Logical (new)

I would like to make the G partition a primary partition using the DDS10 conversion process. However, only logical is available. The E partition in also a logical partition, however, DDS10 provides to option to convert this partition to primary.

Question: Why will DDS10 allow me to convert partition E to primary but not partition G?

 

Baron826:

Partition tables have room for only 4 slots. Each primary partition takes up one slot and a logical partition container, which can contain an unlimited number of logical partitions, takes up a slot. So you can have either 4 primary partitions and no logicals, or 3 primaries and an unlimited number of logicals, etc.

I think what's happening in DDS is that if you try to convert G (the second logical) to a primary partition you are denied because you already have the partition table filled and there are no empty slots for another primary.

If you try to convert E, which is your first logical partition, to a primary then the operation will succeed, but in the process the logical partition container will be deleted and replaced with a primary partition. Therefore you will break the "chain" of logical partition links and lose access to your remaining logical partition (G) if you try this.

DDS should warn you about this. Try it without committing to see if you get a warning. Click on E and choose to convert it to a primary. Do not commit by clicking on the checkered flag. Do you get a warning? Does the graphic image of the partition layout show that partition G vanishes? (Cancel the operation to prevent it from being committed).

 

Mark,

Thanks for your quick reply and information. I was aware of the 4 partition limit but could not understand why DDS10 would allow a 5th primary partion as a conversion option. After sparking up DDS10 again and reviewing the partition conversion options for partitions E and G, I found that the primary partition conversion option for both partitions is now not available (grayed out). I believe that what may have happened is that after creating the G partition (2nd logical), the changes were still pending, which I believe may be why DDS10 allowed the conversion of partition E from logical to primary. I suspect that an error would have been generated if I also selected primary for partition E and commited both changes.

John

 

John:

Your explanation makes sense. I couldn't have imagined that Disk Director would allow deletion of the whole logical partition container, risking the loss of all logical partitions, without some kind of a warning message.

 

This is mostly true in my experience. But when doing Acronis' acrobatics this seems more likely.

But on one occasion (and another using Acronis' DD10's "proper" capability) where this happened (without any error or warning message) it was recoverable using the 'recover lost partition' utility of DD10 and thus it was just 20-25 minutes before the system was saved (OH YES!, my machine is on the slow side when recovering using DD10 [or for that matter TI10]).