Creating partitions, now here's a funny thing!

GokuFurinji

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Scenario:

2 x IBM ATA-100 drives on an A-Bit Hotrod PCI Controller.

Drive 1 (Master) = 60Gb, FDISK'd and Split 50/50 Primary/Extended Partition (C,D drives) FAT32
This drive boots WinME!

Drive 2 (Slave) = 46Gb, FDISK'd and Split 50/50 in ONE Extended Partition (E,F drives) FAT32

Question:

Why does Partion Magic show 7.8mb of unallocated space on Drive 2 preceeding the first partition? FDISK seems to lose this ammount when creating just an EXTENDED partition without telling anyone! If I create a PRIMARY partition, like Drive 1, I don't get this problem!!

I also noticed the total AVAILABLE space on the drive is LESS (by about 8mb) when creating an EXTENDED partition with FDISK!

Is this normal? Why is there unallocated space, can't I use the full drive capacity with extended partitions?
 

Spdy_Gonzales

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Pardon my ignorance, but why would anyone not want to create a primary partition?

<font color=green>I wonder...what is the speed of gravity!</font color=green> :smile: <font color=red>Change the sig of the week</font color=red>
 
G

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It seems kinda funny that you complaining about losing 8MB when you have 106GB of harddrive space. If you're concerned about that you must really be mad about all the space you lose by using 32KB clusters on small files. :wink:
But seriously, yes this is normal. I can't give you the technical reason why this happens, but it's happened to me tons of times. Partition Magic is just more honest about it than fdisk. If you've used partition magic for your partitions before, you'll have seen that, say you type in 15000MB for the partition size, it may resize it to say 14983 or 15002, etc.

*****

That's what you get for buying your computer based on <font color=orange>color</font color=orange>. :redface:
 

GokuFurinji

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OK guys, chill out will ya! he he! It's not a complaint!

The reason I don't want a Primary partition on Drive 2 is it screws the drive lettering. I want to keep C,D on one drive and E,F on the other, and the only way to do that is to make the 2nd drive an extended partition and split that! Primary partions always get first grabs at drive letters!

My cluster size is 16k (FAT32) so it's only half as bad so I'll only get half as mad :lol:

OK, 100 GIG+ of storage is extreme :tongue: , but with drive prices so darn cheap, hell, why not!!

I just wanted to know WHY the iddy biddy 7.8mb of space gets left, that's all! Partition Magic sees it as a Primary partition but unallocated, in other words it's as though you HAVE to have a PRIMARY partition whether you use it or not and 7.8mb, I assume, is the minimum for a Primary partition?

Oh, and Norton Disk Doctor throws an 'Error on Hard disk 2 - an extended partition may be inavlid' or something to that effect, so it don't like that unallocated space either!!

Anyone else have something to add?
 

killall

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boot sector? a bit big to be the boot sector but then again... who knows microsoft fdisk... get partition magic, use that...

if in doubt blame microsoft...
 

GokuFurinji

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Well, I've tried Partition Magic and guess what? It does the same thing :lol: , leaves the same amount of space??

I give in, let's blame <b>MICROSOFT</b>

End :tongue:
 
I used Partition Magic to re-partition a friends HDD. I discovered the same sort of thing. The partition was called " *: ". Its almost like its the extended partition and the C: is a logical partition.

Solved it by merging them and allowing the small to be made into a folder on the large. When I looked in, it was made up of what seemed to be FAT16 stuff.

Deleted the folder. Everything's cool.

<b><font color=blue>Change the</font color=blue><font color=red> sig of</font color=red><font color=green> the week!</font color=green> :tongue: </b>
 

GokuFurinji

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Been there, done that :lol:

Yep, me did the same thing, made the unallocated space a partition and merged it with the adjacent one, trouble was the whole lot became a PRIMARY partion when I merged them so totally negating my objective! Converting it back to an extended partition created unallocated space again!!! Jeez, I just can't win!

This problem only manifests itself when you create just an extended partition with no primary partition, and I believe you can only do this if you drive is NOT the boot drive!

I e-mailed IBM, the maker of the drive in question, about the unallocated space, and was told to update the MoBo BIOS (it had the latest BIOS, but it's on old board A-BIT BX6 v2.0) or use Ontrack Diskmanager, which I did use, but it still left unallocated space!

This really is getting to sound like me being childish and wasting time, but I really DO want to find out why this unallocated space appears, it's an itch that really needs scratching!