5 Primary partitions?

H

HeadOnAPike

Member
So Disk Management only allows me to create 3 primary partitions and and extended. I had three primary, and I left a lot of space unallocated. I then installed Ubuntu. Now the swap partition I created for Ubuntu is a primary, giving 4 primary partitions. On top of that, the partition for Ubuntu itself says primary, even though it's inside the extended partition. The Ubuntu partition inside the extended partition has 8mb of free space on both sides of it. Take a look:

diskman.jpg
 
It's a known bug in Windows Vista+ disk management.

It'll incorrectly show partitions following an extended partition as being primary, even though they're not.

If you want the truth, I wrote a companion/helper application for EasyBCD that can give you some insight into what's really there:

EasyBCD 2.0 -> Useful Utilities -> Power Console
Code: 
bootgrabber.exe /list

That last part of the line "Yes" indicates if it's a primary partition or not. It's a bit hard on the eyes (not meant to be read by humans!), but it should provide the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the matter :smile:

Addendum:

Logical partitions that are either hidden or of an unsupported file system will show up in Vista’s Disk Management utility as primary partitions. Not only that but the extended partition can appear to not include these logicals. It can be confusing the first time you see it and can make you think you have a corrupted partition table. The drive shown here has three primary partitions and one extended with six logicals inside it. All but the third and sixth logicals are hidden. Most third-party apps running from inside Vista will see things correctly. (SP1-2, 2008 and Windows 7 have not rectified this issue). Click image below for larger version or zoom-in with your browser.
Click to expand...

from Multibooters, Vista Dual and Multibooting - Vista's Quirks and Bugs
 
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Could you recommend a better disk manager that's free? Right now because of this glitch I can't do anything with the unallocated space.

I did that:

EBCDbootloader.jpg


It shows that I have 4 primary partitions. I thought the limit was three and an extended?
 
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So is the partition limit three primaries or 4? Also, could you respond to my other, I did what you said and would really like to be able to boot to Ubuntu.
 
I'll leave it to CG to comment on your bootgrabber output.
The MBR partition table has 4 spaces.
Only one can be extended (that's essentially just a pointer to another table which describes the logical drives).
If you have an extended, that leaves space for 3 primaries. If not you can have 4.
If bootgrabber or DM is indicating something different. It's either a corrupted partition table or a software bug.
 
You've got something very wrong with your system.

Now Disk Management shows that you have 5 primaries, which is a known Disk Management bug. BootGrabber correctly reflects 4 primary partitions, the last of which is an extended partition.

However, BootGrabber indicates that you have an additional extended partition, which isn't allowed..

If you've just installed Ubuntu (and therefore don't have anything of value on it yet), I'd recommend booting into GParted, deleting the partitions after the unallocated space, creating an extended partition and creating new logical partitions within it as needed before reinstalling.
 
I was under the impression that the more RAM you had, the less swap space you needed. i.e. back when 512MB was a lot, it would sometimes help performance in some games to lower the amount of virtual memory in Windows.

Anyway, on to round two. This time I allocated an extended partition in Disk Management. On it, I partitioned one logical drive, a 118GB partition for file storage. I then partitioned the other drives fr Ubuntu in GParted. Here is the result:

disk2.jpg

EBCD2.jpg


Still doesn't work, sends me to grub console just the same. Next time I am think about doing all the partitions in Disk Management.

*sigh*
 
Those multiple P,0 lines seem standard with bootgrabber CG.
It seems to do one preceding each logical.
I've got loads, and my layout is fine (for real and in DM)
 
I'm afraid I'm the wrong person to ask for Linux advice.
I'm very much a Linux part-timer. For me it's an occasional tool for circumventing Windows permissions.
I don't use it enough to have gained any expertise, and I upgraded progressively from 8.04 meaning that my 9.10 still uses grub.
Consequently my grub2 knowledge is zero outside the correct Easy2 procedure for using it, and that's a sentence in the sticky.
 
EasyBCD relies on some GRUB code to load the correct partition. It does a lot of stuff before calling the GRUB code, but if the GRUB code fails to load the required menu file (created by EBCD), then there isn't much we can do.

I can try checking in with some of the other GRUB developers, see if they know of/are working on this matter - you're not the first with this problem in recent months.
 
Repartition *would* solve your problem.... unless you re-create the same circumstances that are driving GRUB crazy. So I don't know what to recommend right now :smile:
 
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