Partitioning a single HDD with 4 primary volumes on it

You would need to remove one of the existing Primary partitions or convert one to a Logical partition before you can add any partitions. There are only four slots in the partition table and all of them are currently used.

If you're not using BitLocker, I would recommend removing the System partition (assuming it's just the standard Windows 7 version). Instructions can be provided for this. Of course, if you don't care about the Recovery partition or the "tools" partition either of those could be deleted.

Can you post a screenshot of what DD and Disk Management show for the drive? I'm asking for both because sometimes Windows sees a drive differently than DD.

Thanks for that.

I've taken 3 screen shots of the disk configuration - by the windows 7 start/computer tag, the windows control panel/admin tools/disk management tag, and by DD11. They are all attached, total of about 300Kb of jpg images

Given your remarks, my inclination would be to make the tools volume a logical drive.
Davidk

If you don't need the Tools partition another option would be to just remove it. Note that it won't be usable when converted to Logical so it won't really matter. I assume you have already created a backup image of the drive in case you ever want to restore the Recovery and Tool partitions.

What I would probably do is delete the Tools partition and then resize the Windows partition smaller. Then create the new Logical partition(s) in the unallocated space. If you decide to convert the Tools partition to Logical and then resize C: smaller and create Logical partitions, you will create a "mixed" Primary/Logical structure that DD will work with, but Windows Disk Management will not. I would avoid this, if possible since it can cause unexpected problems. Note that the "mixed" layout is not wrong, it's just that Disk Management won't see the partitions correctly.

Moving the Recovery partition may break it (requiring it to be fixed before it's usable). This depends on how it's configured. Most systems I've worked on it's already been broken and I have to trigger it manually anyway. If you're doing image backups/restores this shouldn't even be a problem.

Whatever changes you do, do them one at a time (commit each change before applying another). This will help avoid problems.

Thank you.

I've also had a dialogue with the HP help desk and they confirmed that the tools partition is where their tools are. Since its primary, I presume that somewhere there's a notice on how to boot to them but I haven't found it yet. They also provided me this link http://ask-leo.com/what_are_these_partitions_on_my_hard_drive.html which talks about the usefulness of recovery partitions. And in essence it seems that its the OEM copy of the windows as installed. Leo's not impressed with this and suggests that its usefulness is pretty limited (given the need to regularly update the OS in use) to an unstable system (corrupted by something). Recovering from that is better done with up-to-date backups if they are available. In hard disk crash situation, the recovery partition is inaccessible and thus unusable. Copies of windows in external backup or on CD/DVD are then a better way out when the system has a new HDD installed.

Since I have both (a TIH backup copy) and windows installation disks bought for another machine, applying either would seem to fit the circumstance, the latter with the related OEM license code.

My latest thought on this to (related to the DD11 image I sent previously):
1. delete the recovery partition, leaving the others untouched
2. re-size the C drive partition to about 60Gb
3. Use the resulting unallocated space (about 240Gb) between the C: partition and the HP Tools partition to create 3 logical drives (100, 50, 80 Gb respectively).

What would your advice be to this approach?

David

That should work fine. A lot of people (myself included) make an image backup of the drive when it's new so they have a copy of all the OEM partitions and then change things how they want (like removing everything but the Windows partition).

You are correct about the backups -- it's much better to recover from a current backup than doing the recovery. It can take many hours (or even days) to update and configure a system like that because it's so out of date.

Thank you for the advice. and speedy responses. I'll proceed on the basis outlined.

David

One last comment/observation on this.

In the past with other tools and DD, I've found it works better if the program starts from an external drive - eg a FDD or DVD. But in this case, I tried running from the copy of DD on the main system. The 1st item was deletion of the recovery partition, and after committing it said Ok, rebooting. But during that process something went wrong: the re-boot started and at the white-on-black text screen there was an error message - an error code and a statement about a missing file. Unfortunately I did not write down the details. When windows started, the deleted partition was back (no changes made).

So I got out the trusty bootable rescue media and booted from that. Opening DD11 and making all the changes in sequence (remove partition, re-size C, create 4 logical drives in unallocated space) all worked without a problem.

Any ideas re the cause of the hick-up when running from the main system OS?

David

It's usually recommended to do "reboot" procedures by booting to the boot media since this gets Windows out of the way and also gets DD off auto-pilot. In most cases, an abort like that is caused by something unexpected (drive error, drive not found, drive not accessible, etc.).