Setting up partition in vista for windows 7

I have an Asus N20A and it shipped with a C: primary partition and a D: extended partition of 100gb. So I shrank the D: by half to get 2 50 gb partition and I plan on installing win 7 on one of those. However, I notice that these 2 partitions are extended partition and logical drives. Do I need to make these 2 into primary partition? How do I do it? I am not sure I understand the differences between primary, extended, logical etc2

 

AFAIK



You can have up to 4 primary partitions, only one of which can be active at a given time. An extended is subordinate to a primary. There can be only one and it can contain logicals. So, if you have any logicals you have to have an extended and a Primary that houses logicals is actually an extended by definition.
As an example: a hard drive with one primary and one extended, with two logical drives, would show three drives, C:, D:, and E: (assuming the CD or DVD drives weren't lettered D: or E
Think of extended and logicals as virtual and it might help you understand it better. It's a way to get around the 4 primary limit.
Other physical drives, like floppys or cd readers etc don't have anything to do with partitions other than when it comes time to give them a letter.
When you were setting up your linux, you will have had to at least create a primary linux and a swap. If you decided to get into extendeds, it would have been for back ups really.

For more information about partitioning ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

and Yes i think you should create atleast one Primary partition because some operating systems don't allow you install on Extended Partitions

 

Any ideas on how to create a primary partition? Should I combine the extended and primary first to create a big primary and then partition from there?

 

Yes ... You should create primary partition then create extended ones...

AFAIK you should have atleast 1 primary partitions in your system and you can use something like GParted to do the partitioning / resizing

here you can find many useful documentations

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/documentation.php

 

Right now you have the following set of partitions (parsing through your initial description): One primary partition, labelled "C:\" on which your _Vista OS is installed; One extended partition that now contains two logical partitions, labelled "D:\" and - here I'm assuming as you didn't say - "F:\" (I am assuming that your optical drive is labelled "E:\").

Logical partitions really should be called subpartitions because they can only exist within a so-called extended partition. So, graphically, what you have should look something like this:

Code:

|-----------||--------------------------|
|   Prim.   ||     Ext. Partition       |
| Partition || |----------||----------| |
|   "C:\"    || |   "D:\"   ||   "E:\"   | |
|           || |----------||----------| |
|           ||                          |
|-----------||--------------------------|

Now, what you need is a second so-called "Primary" partition on which to install Win7.

To accomplish that you need to convert, let's say, your current logical partition "E:\" first into unallocated space on your hard drive, and then you need to create a brand-new primary partition out of that space and format it with an NTFS file system (note, this is merely descriptive).

The first step is to go into the disk management control applet and delete the "E:\" partition. Now, I don't have a spare hdd to experiment on, so there are two alternatives, each of which I will briefly describe.

Alternative One:
If deleting the "E:\" partition simply returns that space to the "D:\" partition, so that you are left with an extended partition containing 100GB (like your initial configuration), your next step is to "shrink" that "D:\" partition by 50GB and convert the space that's removed to so-called unallocated space on your drive. That should leave you with a primary partition labelled "C:\", an extended partition containing only one logical partition labelled "D:\", and 50GB of unallocated space.

From there, you need to create a new primary partition out of that unallocated space, format it as NTFS, and then assign it whatever drive letter you want that hasn't already been used.

Alternative Two:
If deleting the "E:\" partition converts that space directly into unallocated space, so that you are left with one primary partition labelled "C:\", one extended partition containing one 50GB logical partition labelled "D:\" and 50GB of unallocated space, then the next (and last) step is to create a new primary partition out of that 50GB of unallocated space, format it as NTFS, and assign it whatever unused drive letter you want to assign to it.

Please keep in mind, when I talk about an extended partition containing one logical partition labelled "D:\" that is my attempt to stick with conceptually clear language, it is not what you will actually see when you look at what the disk management control applet is showing you. Instead, what the control applet will show you is two partitions, one primary labelled "C:\" and one extended partition labelled "D:\" - unfortunately, for the purposes of learning what's going on with your partitions, the disk management applet confuses the issue conceptually in order to clarify things descriptively.

 

^^^^ Brilliant answer + rep.

However, when I first shrank the D: , I got 50 gb of unallocated space as you mentioned. However, when I did the "new simple volume" thing, the unallocated ended up as a logical. How do I separate the so called E: from the extended partition. It is exactly like in your diagram, you are a sooo helpful.