David said:
I've got a 500Gb USB drive that I'd like to carve up into 4 basic
partitions, 3 NTFS and 1 FAT32 so I can use it on my iMac.
I'm using the Computer Management software to create and format the
partitions. Unfortunately, there's this unnamed 200MB partition that I
can't seem to get rid of. So, right now, the drive looks like this:
200MB Unnamed (format type unspecified)
73Gb E: NTFS
53Gb F: NTFS
60Gb G: NTFS
278Gb Unallocated
How do I get rid of the first partition so that I can allocate the
rest of the drive to FAT32?
TIA,
David
You can have four primary partitions, as shown here.
http://www.lissot.net/partition/partition-03.html
If a logical partition is used, it is possible to have
more partitions. The logical is a container for more
of them.
You can use a tool like this, to examine the numbers in the partition
table. Double clicking the "type" field, brings up a table of
values. There are lots of little utilities like this, in
various OSes, for examination.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/
PTEDIT32.zip --> PTEDIT32.EXE
This is an example for one of my disks.
<--- Start ----> <---- End ---->
Type Boot Cyl Head Sector Cyl Head Sector Sectors_before Sectors
0C 80 0 1 1 1023 254 63 63 40965687
0C 00 1023 0 1 1023 254 63 40965750 40965750
83 00 1023 1 1 1023 254 63 118800738 37495647
82 00 1023 1 1 1023 254 63 81931563 36869112
The partitions don't have to be inserted in the table, is spatial order.
In that example, partition #3 is the fourth entry in the table,
while partition #4 is the third entry. The Sectors_before is what
gives me that info.
Those four are primary, for whatever that is worth. The first partition
is marked active, and is the bootable OS on that drive. Partition #3
is an OS partition, but an external bootstrap is used to access it.
Partition #4 is swap space. The second small partition is a data
partition.
In principle, you could edit your partition table using that tool,
hook up the space at the end of the disk, and disconnect reference
to the 200MB portion. You'd want to carefully write down the
current values, and keep a copy of the tool. If a day arrives, where
you need the 200MB thing, you could hook it back up. But you'd have
to be insane to work on a disk that way, with valuable data on it.
Once the OS gets at it, and attempts to write to some partition
or repair something, then you'd really be screwed. (I use PTEDIT32
purely for a quick check of what is in there.)
There is a free partition manager here, but no partition editor is
completely without issues. You want a backup of the disk, before
doing any brain surgery. Even Partition Magic has been known to make
luncheon meat out of a disk, so it pays to have a backup handy.
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm
Partition managers can move partitions around, copy the files in
a partition and so on. In some cases, they have to reboot into a
DOS-like environment, when dealing with the boot partition (as the
boot partition would normally be "busy"). If you wanted to
reclaim that 200MB of space (i.e. erase and potentially overwrite
it with something), a partition manager can do that for you.
My suggestion of screwing with the partition table entries,
would be to make the 200MB "invisible". If you made it invisible,
and then used a tool like TestDisk or some commercial
data recovery tool, it might notice the invisible space,
and try and make a partition table entry for it. So being
creative, can have its side effects.
When you're in Disk Management, does it give you the option to
delete that 200MB partition, even if the file system type is
unknown ? Maybe you could do that, and then try to change the
278GB chunk at the end of the disk, into a partition. Before
you "format" anything, you could use PTEDIT32 and have a look
at the numbers, to see how the partition has been set up.
Take care,
Paul
