Help needed in creating a partition

[kekenrot]

Hello everyone, I'm not really much informed about partitions and stuff so I've come here to get my problem solved. I believe this might be an easy one for people here so please bear with me.

I have windows 8.1. 64 bit. One of my partition E: (73gb) was low in size so I wanted to create a new partition. So like a noob I am, I used the shrink volume option from another partition F: (1700gb) and tried to create a new partition from it of 500gb.

I tried to create a new simple drive from this unallocated space of 500gb and at the end of the wizard, it showed me the error of "You cannot create a new volume in this unallocated space because the disk already contains the maximum number of partitions". So now here stand my 500GB, all dressed up and nowhere to go.

I have included above a screenshot of my disk management screen. I have already taken all my data in E: and copied it to F: . What I would like to know now is, can I delete E: partition and then use ALL the unallocated space(E: space + 500gb unallocated space) to create a new simple drive? It's not going to give me any more errors if I do that, right? I just don't want to mess up anything anymore.

 

[JoeMomma]

Yes you can do that.

EaseUS Partition Master makes managing partitions much easier and with more control than Windows Disk Management.

I don't know why you have so many partitions when you can just use folders.
That is sort of obsolete once Windows gained the ability to address large drives and makes managment more difficult.
As you can see, because you are asking for help with a problem.
I am sure you have a good reason. It's your PC you can do what you want.

 

[SkyNetRising]

There are limitations in MBR partition scheme - only up to 4 primary partitions are possible (or 3 primary plus 1 extended partition). Extended Partition can have up to 255 logical drives inside of it).

You can delete E: and extended partition (green colored rectangle), then you'll be able to create partition in unallocated 488GB space.
But you can't combine 73GB space and 488GB space, because another partition is in the middle.

Most effective way of utilizing the space would be:

• 1. Backup contents of F: to another drive;
  2. Delete E: and F: partitions and extended partition (green rectangle);
  3. Create new extended partition in all the available space;
  4. Recreate F: inside extended partition (size 1179GB) and restore backed up data to it;
  5. Recreate E: inside extended partition and copy back data from F:

 

[kekenrot]

Thank you very much JoeMomma and SkyNetRising for the detailed answer. I now understand a bit more about partitions.