Need info on: Recovery and MD Partition

Hiya,

okay I'm sitting here with a 250 GB HDD and I really need a 100 GB partition seperate from the OS partition.
I can't create a 5th partition since it's limited to 4
ATM my setup is as follows:

188 MB Utilities
121 GB OS
9,99 GB Recovery
2,50 GB ????
85 GB unallocated

So, first-off,
1)what's in the ???? partition.
2)What are the contents the Recovery partition
3) If I remove the partiton, will I be able to someh-how get the same partition settings with discs?
4)Are all of the contents on the hdd also on the bundled discs?

thx

 

1) I think the 2.5GB would be your Media Direct partition.
2) Don't know. I reformatted my HDD when I first received my M1530.
3) Best if you reformat from scratch.
4) I think there may be a few programs that aren't on the discs e.g. McAfee. Other than that, you can get any missing drivers from the Dell website. Most of them are on the Driver disc though.

 

2.5GB is your media direct partition, you can remove that if you want, but you'll need to repair the Vista mbr (you can do it with the Vista CD).

Recover partition doesnt have anything on it that doesnt come on the CD, so you can get rid of it IF you are happy enough to use the CD method if you ever need to do a fresh install.

188MB Utilities...ive never used them. Diagnostics and stuff.

I usually get rid of everything. Its no different to buying a new HDD, you're not going to have any problems, and everything is on the CDs or online if you want to get it again.

 

by mbr you mean motherboard?

 

MBR as in Master Boot Record.

 

As Hirohata said it stands for Master Boot Record. It tells the computer which partition to boot from and is set up when the operating system is installed.

 

Wow, that sounds extremely, um, tedious.
So, could I say, delete the RECOVERY partition and backup the files, later on decide that I need a recovery partition and just create one and copy paste the files into the newly created recovery partition. I'm guessing no.
Would there be any other way to restore my PCs partitions settings to the factory settings??

 

-Put the Vista DVD into the drive (at startup).
-Navigate to the command line.
-Type bootrec.exe /fixmbr

Thats it

The mbr is the master boot record. If you delete/move/mess-with partitions that contain bootable OS's, usually (not always) you'll have to repair the mbr or it gets a bit confused. Not a big deal, only takes a few seconds.

 

Okay, one more question.
Is the Setup of Vista which was installed from the Recovery Disc identical from the Installation on the CD, i.e. will I have the bloatware on the disc as well or is it a clean OEM CD?

 

Just get a decent partitioning application. GParted is free (liveCD), but others work as well.

There is no such limit as 4 partitions. Neither Dell imposes a limit by the way the have partitioned the drive:

. The BIOS can only boot from a primary partition (and not a logical one).
. There can be at most 4 primary partitions
. There can be an unlimited (only by the size of the hard drive) number of logical paritions. However logical partitions are required to be embedded in one big extended partition. This extended partition takes one of the 4 slots for the primary partitions. That means you may have 3 primary ones, one extended and an unlimited number of logical partitions.

I suggest this:
. keep recovery
. shrink the OS (primary) partition to accomodate the additional partition
. create a logical partition inside the created space. Since the MD partition is a logical one and an extended partition is available it works.

I have 7 partitions on my single M1330 harddrive.

The XPS doesn't come with much bloatware. Uninstall the software you don't require. Dell puts much effort in the configuration of Vista that most people don't recognize who format their drives (AHCI drivers, Dell recommended power plan, Quickset, ...). And applications that are installed, but not launched don't harm. They just take a ridiculous small space on the harddrive compared to other services such as Windows recovery.

 

Sounds good!
Okay, I already shrunk my C drive and have 98 GBs of unallocated space.
So, I just burn gparted onto a disc, reboot, start from disc and create a logical partition in the MD partition?

 

Okay, I ran gparted but I couldn't do anything with the unallocated space. Is there anything I can do with it?

 

bumppppppp

 

Hmm.

The logical partitions reside inside an extended partition. Maybe you have to extend this extended partition first in order to place additional logical partitions. I thought Gparted would be smart enough to figure that on it's own.

 

You mean I should extend the MD partition?
Any idea how I'm supposed to do that?
I played around a bit with Gparted but I couldn't figure it out
(If possible without me having to format wiping my os partition)

EDIT: Ah right, after re-reading your post and checking gparted I think I know what I have to do.
Just re-extend the MD partition amiright?
Will re-extending it format the files in any way?

 

badadadabump

 

Hey, I really hate doing this but I REALLY need this partition.
So, to the question once again:
If I [re]-extend the MD partition will I have to restore the MD files?
Will it mess up my system etc.

 

If you touch the MD partition it will break the MediaDirect. All you can touch is the extended partition in which the logical MD partition sits. The extended partition is an envelope for all logical partitions. And the only reason (although I expected GParted to do that on its own) to touch this extended partition is to make room for the other logical partition you intend to create.

I will do a reboot in 30min and check GParted. But I expect it to allow to create a logical partition without any hassle. Just make sure not to create a primary partition (which is not possible since all 4 primary parition slots are in use already).

I also know that the windows partitioning tool and even the command line version DISKPART.EXE would NOT allow you to do that. This one is too restricted and stupid. However GParted should ... (I also did it).

 

Great, that'd be great because IIRC I couldn't format the envelope (extended partition). I had about 1 MB unallocated, 2.5 GB with MD.

 

I can't give you a step by step guide, since I'm not keen on breaking my existing system and don't have a free harddisc to test (and also don't want to create images etc. just for that purpose).

Anyway. This is about the way it has to look:



A couple of things can be seen from there:
. You are not supposed to format the envelope extended partition. In my case that's /dev/sda3. In fact you can't.
. You see a logical NTFS /dev/sda5 partition (D:\ in Windows) inside the /dev/sda3 extended container.
. You are supposed to put the NTFS inside your extended one and don't touch the MD partition (/dev/sda7 in my case). If that doesn't work for some reason then shift your extended partition to the left. To the left is the space that got free after you shrunk your primary NTFS partition. And once the extended is sufficiently big you should be able to put the logical one inside.

If all that doesn't help you, then maybe try another of the commercial repartitioning applications. Or choose another partitioning style. E.g. by killing recovery (though I don't recommend that), shifting C:\ to the left and creating a new primary one D:\

 

Got it!
Problem is I can't find the partition in Vista and when I go into Device Manager I can't format it either, I think it has something to do with the fact, that the MD partition isn't visible either.
The newly assigned partition has no letter assigned to it either.

EDIT: Nevermind, I forgot the format it to ntfs.

BILLION THANKS! I'd give you more reputation if I could, but I can't.

THANK YOU AGAIN

 

I see you got it, but we can also figure out the remaining questions:

The MD partition is the one to the very right in your screenshot. The 2.5GB one.

Actually Windows is supposed to display the extended partition as well. However since it's just a container and nothing you can format, it does display this partition as a green surrounding box:



However what you can also see from this figure: Windows is just too stupid for this task. It doesn't highlight the correct partitions and it even names some partitions "primary" which are not primary ones.

Although Windows got better with the shipped partitioning tools (e.g. beginning with Vista you may shrink partitions by up to 50%), there are still too many bugs, restrictions and flaws left. If you do advanced partitioning to your HDD, you still require a third party tool.