m1330 hard drive partition question

hi, i just received my xps m1330 from dell outlet.
i got a 250G hard drive and wanted to resize the partitions.
since pqmagic wont work on vista, i tried to used disk management software.

I can see four partition on my laptop:
1. 78Mb EISA configuration;
2. recovery D:, 10G;
3. OS C:, 220.3G;
4. 2.5G primary partition, no drive letter or anything, dont know why it is there.

Does m1330 normally have these partitions? What is the function of EISA partition? and can I delete the 2.5G primary partition?

thanks!!

 

don't delete the primary, itll probably mess you up
im going to go check the magical world of google for you

dont delete EISA, its very very important http://support.microsoft.com/kb/242168

this is a primary partition: One of the two disk partitions without filesystems where SGI Cluster Manager keeps configuration, cluster, and service status information

yea, don't delete that, the EISA stands for Extended Industry Standard Architecture in case youre lazy like me and don't want to read the page
220 GB isn't enough? dang, must have a lot of crap hehe, jk with ya

btw, says something about the diskpart DOS command, thats used for dual booting, might want to look into that you might

 

thank you very much for your reply!!

 

no problem, have fun with your comp, hope you can get it partitioned to something taht works perfectly for you, although what you have seems to be fine
anyway, good luck

 

4. 2.5G primary partition, no drive letter or anything, dont know why it is there

After some googling, I believe this partition is for Dell Media Direct.
Can somebody confirm this?

Thanks!

 

It is for Dell MediaDirect. The first you spoke contains your boot loader, the 10Gb is your recovery partition and the remaining your free drive.

The unfortunate part is Vista's limit is 4 partitions so you cannot create another....

Unless you do a clean install, your pretty much set.

If you are interested in a Clean Install, my thread below will guide you. You will be able to choose your partitions when creating room for MediaDirect. You can create one more because you have removed the recovery partition. So you will have a C: and D: drive.

After you are done the Clean Install, or even if you don't choose to follow it, check out my Tips and tweaks thread below.

 

no its not, because
this is a primary partition: One of the two disk partitions without filesystems where SGI Cluster Manager keeps configuration, cluster, and service status information
sounds like a boot loader to me

Edit: as I was typing flamenko did that >.>
twice the replies, heh ;D

 

Thank you very much for your informative reply!!
I just began to use vista two days ago. under xp you can get several partitions (>>4); it is hard to see that vista can only have four...
I think I will stay with it for now and get more used to vista. maybe I will reinstall the vista soon.

thanks again.

 

only 4 partitions? I do believe that is false....On my desktop, I ahve 1.65TB of Disk space broken up into i believe 7 partitions.....

Or do you mean max 4 partitions per physical HD? That makes more sense as even with a 1TB drive, there is not reason to create any smaller than 4x ~240GB partitions....

 

Oh, well, this person seems to be actual certified tech support, Flamenko i mean, so uh yea, listen to him...lol
good luck
plus, Schmitty, are you running XP or vista

 

This is from this site at Microsoft:

 

Vista x64, Mandrive 2008, and XP pro x86.

And Flamenko is correct, with one caveat, Vista can only support 4 PRIMARY partitions...I don't think there is any limit to the number of logical partitions, which you should be using for general storage and backup partitions anyway.

EDIT: Flamenko just confirmed both of our thoughts above

 

Yes, one can add logical partitions after the fact to the fourth partition which is an extended partition and not primary.

 

after extensive google, I found a good article for this type of question:
link

A basic disk uses primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives to organize data. A formatted partition is also called a volume (the terms volume and partition are often used interchangeably). In this version of Windows, basic disks can have either four primary partitions or three primary and one extended partition. The extended partition can contain multiple logical drives (up to 128 logical drives are supported). The partitions on a basic disk cannot share or split data with other partitions. Each partition on a basic disk is a separate entity on the disk.