Windows 7 - No Primary Partition - Is This Wrong?

Question

My laptop has only one physical disk - but I'm looking at it in 'Disk Management' and I see that all of the partitions are 'Simple volumes'

System (no drive letter) 199MB

Main (C:) 222GB

Ubuntu (H:) 58.59GB

Recovery (D:) 18GB

HP_TOOLS (E:) 103MB

Is this 'bad'? I don't remember it being this way in the past (they are color-coded in the Computer Management screen and I don't remember ever seeing this shade of green on my drive - I swear it was blue).

Is there any reason I should be concerned about this? I'm trying to use wubi.exe to install Linux on my H: partition - is that possibly the cause of this? The install is failing and the opinion on the Ubuntu forums seems to be that there is something wrong with my disk.

EDIT: It appears my /boot folder and /$Recycle.BIN folders are in the 'System' partition that currently has no letter to it.

Answer 1

Your disk uses Microsoft's Logical Disk Manager ("Dynamic Disks") on top of the legacy MBR partitioning scheme. "Dynamic disks" only use a single MBR partition, subdivided by Windows into volumes, which can span multiple physical drives and do not have the "four primaries" limitation of bare MBR.

This is not 'bad' in itself – it makes partitioning much easier when Windows is the only OS on the computer. Linux can access dynamic disks as well (as of 2.4.7). However, the GRUB boot manager commonly used by Linux (including grub4dos, which Wubi uses) does not support booting from a LDM disk. (It should, soon, but I wouldn't count on it reaching grub4dos anytime this year.)

In other words, to install Ubuntu (even Wubi), you will need to use 'basic' MBR or GPT partitioning. Windows doesn't provide a function to convert "back", but people have written tutorials on it. (Be careful.)