partitioning second drive

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rookie1010

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Hello

I was trying to partition my second drive using the computer management in windows xp and the software asked me if i wanted to go for a
dynamic disk or a basic disk? what is a dynamic disk

i went on to partition my drive and i have ended up with 4 partitions with 60 gb left over. it wont let me partition a 5th drive

the drive sizes are
9.77
19.53
29.29
29.29
61.16 (which is the unused portion)

can you guys tell me why wont it let me format and crate a new partition on the last remaining portion?
 
You can only have a maximum of four primary partitions on each disk. Those four are probably primary. If you want more than four partitions at least one of them should be an extended partition. You can create a huge amount of logical partitions inside an extended partition (don't know the limit). You will have to delete one of those primary partitions and create an extended partition.

Dynamic disk is a feature similar to RAID, but it's software based, and only available in Windows XP. You can set up arrays like striped array and stuff. Never tried it myself.
 
i think with a dynamic disk you can set up things like software raid and disk spanning.

does it come up with any message or error with the last disk?
 
thanks for the replies

no it does not come up with an error. the option to create a partition is greyed out.

so if i went for dynamic disk, it would do a RAID, i thought the disks for a RAID configuration needed to be identical?

how would i know if my partitions are primary partitions, should i delete one primary partition and make it an extended partition.

once i create this structure, can i use any of the primary partitions as a linux partition or an unreserved space as a linux partition, or will linux ned to reassign a portion of the first primary partition as some sort of boot up area?
 
I don't know much about the Windows dynamic disk feature. You should look it up on google to learn about it's features. I think all you need is two partitions.

The primary partitions are dark blue, the extended partitions have a green border with light blue logical partitions inside them. If all four of them are primary, delete the last one and make an extended partition instead. You should first install Windows on the first partition. Then leave enough unallocated space after the first partition. You can then choose to have the Linux install program (Yast or whatever) use teh unallocated space to create its partitions. It will install its boot program on a boot partition and reconfigure the MBR to load the Linux boot manager (grub, lilo etc). I could be wrong, but this is how I used to install Linux a few years ago.
 
Then after installing Linux, if you have some unallocated space left after the Linux partitions, create a FAT32 partition so you can store files on that partition with both Linux and Windows, because Linux cannot save data to NTFS partitions. You can also install Windows using FAT32 if you prefer to store your documents on the Windows partition, or don't have enough space to create an extra FAT32 partition. Windows installed on a FAT32 partition will work fine. I don't think you will notice a huge performance difference, it depends on the partition size. For large volumes NTFS is faster, for small volumes the difference is very small.
The file size on FAT32 is limited to 4GB, though. SO you cannot store huge video projects or high resolution images of 4GB+ on a FAT32 partition.
FAT32 also lacks NTFS compression, but don't think you will need that. It also lacks some user rights managing features (or however they are called), but they are not that important to home users IMO.
 
use Basic. I seen a few people jack their hard drives up going with dynamic which is raid based
 
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