more than 4 partitions?

i have 4 right now:
vista, xp, MD3, and this one 47mb partition that i dont exactly know what it does. can i make a fifth? is it possible? i have a 120gb hard drive in a dell m1330. so... can i? id like to install maybe linux or something, but i want to keep xp and vista.

 

i think u can make as many as u want

 

It might be hard on a 120GB though...

 

you can make as many as you want..

 

I am no technical expert on this but as far as I know, hard drives are limited to four primary partitions due to a limitation somewhere (don't know where). As a workaround, one of the partitions can be an extended partition. This extended partition can be broken down into a theoretically infinite number of logical partitions. For all intents and purposes these logical partitions are separate partitions. So I think in your case you have 4 primary partitions. You'll have to delete one of them and then create an extended partition from the free space. Then you can break that one up into as many logical partitions as you would like. As far as I know Windows has to be on a primary partition. Linux works fine on logical partitions. Personally I created one extended partition for Linux and then broke that down into swap, root, boot, and home. So I basically have three windows partitions plus 4 linux partitions giving me 7 partitions. Finally, I think you are limited too one extended partition. Google is your friend if you want to figure out how you should organize your partitions, just search for " primary, extended, and logical partitions."

To actually make the partitions, I personally just use Gparted through an Ubuntu liveCD. It tends to have the most flexible partitioning options and lets me resize my windows partitions (although often this can take several hours). It has a nice graphical representation of everything too. Partitioning through a live CD will allow you to alter any partitions on your hard drive (if you used gparted through an already installed linux partition, you would not be able to resize your linux partitions since you could not unmount them). I've never lost data using gparted but as always, use it at your own risk.

 

but how come, when in vista, after i make unallocated space, i try to make the unallocated space into a partition, it says that i cant make more than 4. if i can make as many as i want, please tell me how, id be very grateful, even some rep

 

Probably because the Vista partition manager tries to create primary partitions only. I would highly recommend using Gparted (a heavily modified Linux environment) for managing partitions.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

 

As I said before, you can't have more than 4 primary partitions. But you can have one extended partition with a theoretically infinite number of logical partitions.