Topic: Windows 7 and partitioning a hard drive

[Sandra]

Last night I was asked to partition a hard drive on a new Medion PC recently bought from Aldi.
It came with a single 1TB hard drive with just under 900gb as the boot partition, a 20gb partition for recovery, a 1gb OEM partition and a 100gb partition reserved for system files.
Windows 7 has a built in utility in Disk Management for shrinking and expanding partitions so I decided to use that feature.
I wanted to shrink the boot partition to around 100gb and make the spare space from that as big as possible for a storage partition.
For some reason the utility only allowed it to be shrunk to around 450gb but that would create a similar size for the storage partition which was acceptable.
I now had the 3 original partitions plus the newly shrunk boot partion with the newly created storage partition showing as unallocated space.
I right clicked on the unallocated space and selected the create a simple volume option. Went through the normal procedure only to get a message at the end saying that there was insufficient space to create the partition  

I rebooted the pc thinking that it may want to finalise something before allowing that partition to be formatted only to get the same message at the end of the procedure.
I found out that the Windows 7 utility has a limitation, apparently SP1 when it comes out will fix the issue, that will only allow a single basic drive to have 4 partitions for some reason. I could have probably used a 3rd party program to partition it properly but as I was short of time I decided to delete the recovery partition, I will probably make an image of the boot drive in a few days so that it was no longer needed anyway, that added the extra 20gb to the unallocated space.
As there were now only a total of 4 partitions the normal create a partition process worked properly.
It would have been a lot easier if the error message had actually said that you could only have 4 partitions instead of saying that there was insufficient space to complete the operation  

[Rik]

A typically helpful error message, Sandra. Would a third-party utility have done better do you think?

[Simon]

Useful to know, Sandra.  I'm waiting for SP1 before I dabble with Win7.

[Sandra]

Would a third-party utility have done better do you think?

I should imagine so Rik, I think its the Windows 7 utility that had the problem, not the OS itself. A 3rd party program would definately have let me choose a smaller size for the boot partition. If you think back to win 95 and 98 days it was quite common to have a lot of 2 gb partitions on a single drive with no limit to how many you could have from what I remember.
What amazes me is why manufacturers dont have sensible partitions on the pcs they supply with such big drives. Its ok having a recovery partition but that wont help recover peoples data such as their photos and other important documents when something goes wrong with the OS.

[Simon]

Ever tried this one, Sandra?

http://www.partition-tool.com/

[Rik]

What amazes me is why manufacturers dont have sensible partitions on the pcs they supply with such big drives. Its ok having a recovery partition but that wont help recover peoples data such as their photos and other important documents when something goes wrong with the OS.

I couldn't agree more, Sandra. On machines I can spec, I have two quite small drives, ~80GB, for OS and Apps, then I have a couple of large drives for data. It's easier for backups, re-installation etc. Plus, you get to move the swap file to a different physical drive.

[Sandra]

Ever tried this one, Sandra?

http://www.partition-tool.com/

I usually use Acronis or Partition Magic Simon as I have a few different programs and they seem to work the best.

[Rodders]

Just for today (Wed, 03-Feb-10) only, Giveawayoftheday.com are distributing Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009 SE.

This version doesn't come with WinPE RCD (or entitlement to a free upgrade to the 2010 edition), but it's still a cracking bit of software which enables you to successfully perform most disk maintenance functions.  I use it myself and recommend you get it while it's hot.   

[Simon]

Grabbed - thanks Rod.