Hi, AricCougar.
No, you don't have 3 Extended Partitions. You have 3 Primary Partitions and
ONE Extended Partition holding 3 Logical Drives. You have the maximum
allowable 4 partitions; the 4th is the Extended Partition. You cannot
create another partition of any kind (because the 64-byte Partition Table in
the MBR is now full with the four 16-byte entries for the four existing
partitions. An Extended Partition cannot be assigned a Drive Letter - or
formatted. But each Logical Drive within it can be assigned a letter and
separately formatted.
How big is your Extended Partition? In Disk Management, does the color bar
extend past your Drive H:? You should see a blue bar over each volume, plus
a green bar running from the last volume to the end of the Extended
Partition. If so, then you should be able to create another simple volume
there; this new simple volume would be created as another Logical Drive in
the same Extended Partition. If there is no green bar following Drive H:,
you have a bigger problem; see below.
How may Logical Drives can an Extended Partition hold? That is limited only
by the space available in the Extended Partition and the sizes of the
Logical Drives - and the 26 letters of the English alphabet, reduced by the
number of letters assigned to optical drives, USB flash drives, cameras and
card readers, network drives, etc. On my 1 TB HDD, I have a single Primary
Partition and a 900 GB Extended Partition currently holding 9 logical
drives, with 400 GB of Free space left in the Extended Partition. I'm
running out of drive letters. because volumes on other HDDs use up another 8
letters.
Your numbers don't add up: 5 x 50 = 250 + 300 = 550; this should leave
about 450 of your 1,000 GB unallocated, not just 60.
But, assuming that DM shows you 60 GB of Free Space after Drive H:,
right-click in that Free Space box and choose New Simple Volume. Post back
with what you see when you try that.
If that free space is outside the Extended Partition, you'll have to first
Extend the Extended Partition to include that space - and I'm not sure Disk
Management can do that. You may have to use the DiskPart.exe shell to do
this. DiskPart is a very powerful tool - and therefore very dangerous in
inexperienced hands. If you need to use this, post back and we'll try to
walk you through it.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
"AricCougar" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:1c80e5a053070a93f39ed7b6281e4d65@xxxxxx-gateway.com...
Quote:
>
> Partition Issue (Adding Vista x64 to Vista x32 1TB Drive)
>
> My 1TB drive is set up as follows:
>
> C: Vista x32 IE7 + VMwares 300GB (Primary)
> D: Vista x32 IE8 50GB (Primary)
> E: XP IE6 50GB (Primary)
> F: XP IE7 50GB (Extended)
> G: XP IE8 50GB (Extended)
> H: Win7 IE8 50GB (Extended)
> Unallocated 60GB
>
> I need to put a new Vista x64 in 50GB of the remaining Unallocated
> space but keep getting this error when trying to partition/format it:
> "Disk Management: You cannot create a volume in this unallocated space
> because the disk already contains the maximum number of partitions."
>
> I understand that we only get 4 primary partitions. How can i add this
> unallocated space to the Extended Partition, and thereby make a
> partition within it to load Vista x64 to boot up like all the others?
>
> Appreciate any quick ideas. Thanks.
>
>
> --
> AricCougar