Acer Aspire 5551 Four partitions - Cannot create another one.

I am unable to get any assistance through e-mail or chat as my Aspire 5551 is no longer covered under warranty. The operation I wish to perform wouldn't be warranty related anyways as my laptop works great, just that I don't know how to proceed with adding another partition to the hard drive. All 3rd party utilities and windows utilities fail at creating more than 4 partitions.

My Acer Aspire has 4 partitions already. C drive, 27gb Backup partition (not formatted but contains a hidden restore image), 2GB System Reserved partition and lastly a 8MB Primary boot partition.

Windows 7 has a maximum of 4 partitions, so I cannot add one. If I attempt to resize C drive and add a new partition, it complains about converting to a dynamic disk and I cancel the operation as I don't want to brick my laptop by making it unbootable.

Question is, can I re-arrange or modify a partition in order to satisfy having a C and D drive and be able to boot and perform the system restore? I like the idea of having to use the system restore without media, DVD discs get scratched and degrade in two to 10 years. I have no access to the data in the backup partition as it is not a valid NTFS format, thus I cannot move the data to a visible NTFS formatted partition.

Kinda crazy sertting up a PC with the maximum partitions which lock out the user from creating more partitions.

Kinda new to this Windows 7 idea and unfamiliar with why there are so many partitions, XP only used one!

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Tommy-Acer

The issue is not a limit on number of partitions, but rather the space to allocate to another partition.

Please see this Microsoft article, Create and format a hard disk partition.

Please do not attempt to change or move the data in the recovery partition, or it may be rendered unusable.

bjchip

The maximum number of PRIMARY partitions is 4. Has been since moby **bleep** was a minnow. To make more ONE of the Primary partitions has had to be assigned to host the logical partitions and all additional partitions are logical and created inside it. So if you assign the 4 primaries you'd be stuck.

That MAY not be true of the new bootloader but it has been true long enough that seeing 4 primary labels on the disks causes a cold sweat for a lot of us. One wonders about the reasoning behind that labeling.

If the Recovery 1, EFI, Recovery 2 and Acer C: drives are all "PRIMARY" partitions then there is no obvious option that allows another logical partition to be created. That IS how they were labeled when I opened Computer Management.

What isn't clear is that there IS in fact an option that makes Windows alter the form of the partition table, basically from your link.

Using the Windows Computer Management -> Disk Management screen you can ask it to make a new volume.

When it does this the 3 offending "primary" partitions wind up relabeled so that there are only 2 "primary" partitions.

The new one that Windows just created as a new Volume (I formatted it NTFS) and the ACER C: Both are labeled as PRIMARY now -

- but the others have now been given other partition catecories (Recovery and System partitions, not "primary") which leaves me wondering at the way this is presenting. It went easily that change, very much faster than a normal partition re-assignment, and I do wonder about it.

I have applications and web installations that REQUIRE linux, windows is incapable and incompetent to my requirements.

Now that I have a separate primary partition I can I think, deal with the remaining issues. I created it as a new NTFS partition and then deleted it. The other drives did not revert to primary.

A new laptop is always an adventure and since my last Acer was robust (11 years of use) I have high expectations for this new one. I'd rather have Windows 7 though, and I'd just as soon not have to sweat through partition issues.

padgett

The reason is that back in the early 1980s when the BIOS specification was created by IBM, the master boot record of a physical disk only had 512 bytes for both the boot loader and the partition table. Since the table had to secribe things like number of tracks, heads, starting address, ending address and such there was only room for four partitions.

Of course at the time a 10MB (not GB) drive cost $3,000.00 this was felt to be enough for a Personal Computer.

Someday we can go into the 640k "barrier" and how Lotus 1-2-3 caused it.

bjchip

Well I know the history, wrote some of it actually, and know more ways it can go wrong than any reasonable being ought to know.

There is no such thing as a primary partition with the UEFI.

The new GPT arrangement appears to allow up to 128 partitions with no more logical and primary differentiations. Depends on UEFI now and THAT becomes a different confusion.

Would be happier with W7 than 8, but dual boot of that is just as bad. There are a lot of cookbook EFI ways to rearrange things... some may work. I have to get into the guts of the structure and boot sequence now because people expect me to know such things and I haven't had a "new" computer in far far too long.