Questions tagged [partitioning]

When you create two or more logical volumes (drives) from one physical hard disk (or other storage device), you're working with partitions.

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What utility can move my Windows boot partition over to another hard drive? [closed]

Can anyone recommend a cheap/free utility that can do this without very much effort? My preference is that it would be really easy. Boot into Windows Pick drive to move Pick target drive It copies ...
21 votes
5 answers
67k views

How to reinstall Windows 10 on new hard disk

I've been using Windows 10 for a couple of month now (joined the Insider Preview). Now my hard drive started ticking so I've bought a new SSD and I want to move the windows installation to the new ...
Shimmy Weitzhandler's user avatar
125 votes
8 answers
219k views

How to shrink Windows 7 boot partition with unmovable files

I have just bought an HP laptop with Windows 7 (64 bit). It has a 500 GB HDD with three partitions: a small hidden system partition, a 12 GiB HP recovery partition, and a 450 GiB C:...
Alex Che's user avatar
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61 votes
9 answers
46k views

Moving users folder on Windows Vista/7 to another partition

When I format the computer and reinstall Windows, my first step is move the My Documents folder to another partition. In Windows XP it wasn't enough because the desktop folder and another user folders ...
Click Ok's user avatar
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10 votes
1 answer
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Uses of single-partition disk configuration

I see in my company's IT installations that there are numerous disks with one partition occupying all of the space on disk. There is typically something like a /dev/sdb with a partition /dev/sdb1, and ...
user1952500's user avatar
72 votes
3 answers
231k views

16 GB USB flash drive capacity down to 938 MB

After writing the FreeNAS IMG to a 16 GB USB flash drive, I can now only use 938 MB. I used the Win32 Disk Imager tool to write the IMG to the device. Then later, when I inserted the the USB drive ...
Samir's user avatar
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40 votes
5 answers
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USB sticks and multiple partitions

I've got a USB stick with multiple Partitions on it (FAT32 (active), FAT32, Ext2, but that's another story) and it seems like that my Windows XP can only mount the first partition of the stick. If I ...
Bobby's user avatar
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122 votes
13 answers
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How can I shrink a Windows 10 partition?

I use a big single partition on a 1TB platter drive with Windows 10. I would like to shrink the partition down so that I can mirror the drive to a smaller but faster 256GB SSD. I bought the drive ...
kdbanman's user avatar
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21 votes
2 answers
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Are GPT reserved and EFI system partitions important?

I wonder what the GPT Reserved Partition and the GPT EFI System Partition are for. Do I need them and what would happen if I removed them? Also what is it for? I mean the 2nd and 3rd one in the ...
user2612619's user avatar
47 votes
15 answers
81k views

Easiest way to move my Windows installation to an SSD?

I've taken the plunge and bought an SSD and want to move my existing Windows installation over. The current hard disk is 500Gb, but I've trimmed the contents down to about ~40Gb. I'm transferring it ...
Jon Artus's user avatar
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6 votes
1 answer
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Windows does not mount USB NTFS superfloppy

I have a Transcend Storejet external USB hard disk. This is not an SSD, but a mechanical disk with rotating plates. I have formatted the whole disk, without partitioning, as NTFS. I have used mkntfs ...
taaatiti's user avatar
48 votes
3 answers
10k views

What if the hard disk is partitioned into more than 26 sections in Windows?

As we know, in Windows the partition location is prefixed with [a-z]:. What happens if there are more than 26 partitions?
winuser's user avatar
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11 votes
5 answers
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How can a MBR formatted hard drive exceed 1.81 TiB capacity?

I recently purchased an external disk drive with 3 terabytes (2.72 TiB) of storage capacity. Now according to Wikipedia's article on MBR, the maximum addressable storage space on a disk formatted ...
Vinayak's user avatar
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58 votes
10 answers
288k views

Unable to format disk: 'The system cannot find the file specified'

I have a USB flash drive, which I may have mucked up, so I used DISKPART's CLEAN to clean it up. I created a simple volume, and tried to format it. (This is all using Windows' disk management.) I was ...
ACarter's user avatar
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46 votes
1 answer
164k views

Windows detects GPT disk as MBR in EFI boot

This disk is OCZ VERTEX 128GB SSD. It is formatted as GPT from OSX. The disk layout is, /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: ...
Sarim's user avatar
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27 votes
3 answers
23k views

Are partitions to the inner/outer edge significantly faster

Some linux dual/multi-boot tutorials / general partitioning tutorials say that the inner side of a hard disk is faster than the outer side so partitions towards the outside tend to be slower while ...
user80551's user avatar
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25 votes
4 answers
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How to correct 512-byte sector MBR on a 4096-byte sector disk?

Final update: I already knew what I needed to do to fix this problem; I just didn't know how to do it. I was hoping there would be some ready-made tool to do that automatically - but couldn't find any....
NothingsImpossible's user avatar
18 votes
5 answers
61k views

Advantages/Disadvantages of Partitioning a Drive

I have a 100GB hard drive in my Win XP Pro desktop. I use an external 250GB drive for backups, and am wondering if there would be any advantages to partitioning my internal hard drive. I understand ...
ColoBob's user avatar
  • 183
2 votes
3 answers
4k views

MBR recovery - Corrupted MBR after it changed to dynamic & testdisk gives up . No backup sector found

I had a Windows 7 installation on my 1TB SSD laptop with 4 primary partitions. I wanted to install Lubuntu Linux but the process failed with an error which kind of said: cannot write MBR It gave ...
user1874594's user avatar
97 votes
6 answers
210k views

Disadvantages of partitioning an SSD?

A wise guy who goes by the name of NickN maintains a lenghty forum post on his views about building a powerful computer (directed towards playing Microsoft's Flight Simulator X, a very demanding piece ...
MarioDS's user avatar
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44 votes
1 answer
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VirtualBox: using physical partition as virtual drive [duplicate]

Background: I am using VirtualBox installed on Windows 7. From within VirtualBox I am using Xubuntu as a virtual OS. The reason I chose this approach is so that I don't have to keep turning off ...
Hamman Samuel's user avatar
44 votes
10 answers
177k views

How do you partition a USB Thumb / Flash Drive?

Out of the box, Windows will not allow you to partition a USB Thumb / Flash Drive. How can you do this? In case anyone is wondering Why you would do this? It's interesting in the case of a BitLocker ...
Omar Shahine's user avatar
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37 votes
3 answers
278k views

How to access efi partition on windows 10?

I am having trouble accessing the EFI partition on windows 10 I tried this method in cmd (I used Administrative privileges ): open cmd as admin... diskpart sel disk 0 sel part 1 (efi part) assign ...
Raffi CH's user avatar
  • 711
29 votes
7 answers
171k views

What is the maximum number of partitions that can be made on a hard drive?

What is the maximum number of partitions we can make on hard disk in Windows? If it is limited to some particular number, why can we assign all the letters C through Z to drives? If it is a special ...
raj's user avatar
  • 591
24 votes
7 answers
32k views

What's the point of hard drives reporting their physical sector size?

I have an SSD that can be configured to report its physical sector size to an OS in two different ways: Option 1: Logical = 512 Bytes, Physical = 512 Bytes Option 2: Logical = 512 Bytes, Physical = ...
misha256's user avatar
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20 votes
3 answers
29k views

How to prevent Mac OS X creating .DS_Store files on non Mac (HFS) Volumes?

Is there a way to prevent Mac OS X creating .DS_Store and other hidden meta-files on foreign volumes like NTFS and FAT? I share an NTFS partition with data like Thunderird & Firefox's profiles and ...
Petruza's user avatar
  • 3,873
4 votes
2 answers
5k views

3TB hard disk displayed as 746GB

in BIOS , UEFI Boot is enabled , ACHI Mode is selected , and the 3TB Hard disk (Seagate ST30000DM001) is installed at SATA Port 3. However, in Windows 7 64-bit, 3TB hard disk is displayed as 746GB, ...
Raptor's user avatar
  • 1,090
67 votes
6 answers
126k views

Why does the partition start on sector 2048 instead of 63?

I had two drives partitioned the same and running two RAID partitions on each. One died and I replaced it under warranty for the same model. While trying to partition it, the first partition can ...
gcb's user avatar
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54 votes
5 answers
122k views

What are the differences between primary and logical partition?

What are the major differences? Which is more preferable? Are there any OS specific advantages for one over the other?
Bernhard Heijstek's user avatar
28 votes
3 answers
102k views

What is this Recovery Partition for on a fresh installation of Windows?

I installed Windows 10 Preview on a fresh SSD and noticed that there is a tiny 450MB Recovery Partition at the end of C: (Ignore the Extended partition containing F:, as I added that myself ...
paradroid's user avatar
  • 23k
10 votes
4 answers
29k views

Is it possible to set the logical sector size of a USB hard disk drive?

I have two supposedly identical 3TB Western Digital USB hard disk drives. One contains nearly the full 3TB of data. I want the other to be a backup of that data. There are lots of small files, so ...
IBBoard's user avatar
  • 286
22 votes
5 answers
269k views

Can't extend C partition. How to make unallocated space "adjacent"

How do I extend my C drive? From: Extend a Basic Volume You can add more space to existing primary partitions and logical drives by extending them into adjacent unallocated space on the same ...
Jonathan's user avatar
  • 457
17 votes
2 answers
20k views

Does or will exFAT support symlinks?

I've just acquired a brand new laptop. Did split my ssd in 3 partitions, one for win7, one for macOSX and one shared data partition. I chose exFAT for this partition, but i did not find how to create ...
Olivier's user avatar
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15 votes
6 answers
24k views

Can a 'system image' be restored to a drive with a different storage capacity?

I have a family member who complains that her laptop is slow. I checked the laptop over and indeed, it was slow, so I looked into what was using the most hardware, and found that the hard drive was at ...
AStopher's user avatar
  • 2,363
13 votes
2 answers
21k views

How do you add more space to a Fedora (LVM) partition?

In a nutshell, i have a VM that ran out of space. I increased the size of the VM's harddrive to be 4 times bigger but the OS partition is still only using 1x the space. I need to change the LVM ...
Trevor Boyd Smith's user avatar
11 votes
3 answers
24k views

Windows on a hybrid MBR/GPT

I thought I'd finally relegated Windows to life inside a virtual machine, but alas, I came across some games I'd like to play that just won't do in that setup. In the days since Windows last occupied ...
Patches's user avatar
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7 votes
1 answer
3k views

Will device-based “wear leveling” equalize access across both SSD partitions?

I can’t see that my specific point is covered by the “Wear Levelling” section in the answer to the earlier question Disadvantages of partitioning an SSD? I’ve been booting Windows 7 from a 32GB SSD ...
FumbleFingers's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
5k views

Extend Windows 7 partition to use free space before it

I have some unallocated space before my Windows 7 partition. Can I move the Windows 7 partition so that the free space is after it instead than before it, and then extend the partition to use all of ...
August Lilleaas's user avatar
5 votes
4 answers
5k views

Suggestions for sharing and using data between Ubuntu and Windows 7 dual boot

Note: TL;DR, scroll to bottom for summary. I recently set up my computer for a dual boot between Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows 7. My current drive setup is as follows. | A1 | A2 | | B1 | B2 |...
wizjany's user avatar
  • 571
155 votes
4 answers
605k views

How to delete a partition on a USB drive?

I have a USB drive that I accidentally partitioned when trying to put Ubuntu on it. It's a 16 GB Kingston flash drive but it is now split to two partitions, 7.30 GB each. How do I combine the two ...
Megaeverything's user avatar
48 votes
4 answers
118k views

How to expand the Windows partition when the Recovery one is in the way?

My partitions on my primary disk look like this: I would like to expand C: with the Unallocated space but the 946 MB Recovery partition is in the way. Is there a way to swap the Recovery partition ...
WoJ's user avatar
  • 3,104
39 votes
7 answers
107k views

Cannot shrink C: partition: Not enough space

I am trying to create a new partition on my laptop (XPS 12 9Q33, 128GB SSD) by shrinking the C:\ partition. However, despite the fact that it indicates there is enough space, it displays an error ...
eidde's user avatar
  • 393
31 votes
8 answers
12k views

Why create many partitions?

I have noticed that when installing Ubuntu some people create multiple partitions for directories. Like one for root, one for home, one for boot. What is the advantage to doing this over installing ...
ryeguy's user avatar
  • 721
14 votes
5 answers
67k views

How to write a bootable ISO Windows installation disk to a disk partition (and not USB flash drive)?

I have already read How to write bootable iso to a partition? and How do I place a bootable ISO on a USB drive?, but here it's a bit different: I'd like to put the Windows 10 (or 7) bootable ISO ...
Basj's user avatar
  • 1,749
13 votes
3 answers
17k views

How to make a partition on external storage read-only? And revert to normal?

Sometimes, I have to give my external storage someone else. But, I am worry about files and folders which accidentally deleted, moved, changed etc... Therefore, it is enough that data on the disk can ...
mmdemirbas's user avatar
11 votes
3 answers
21k views

I want to expand a partition on my boot SSD, but there is a Recovery Partition and EFI System Partition in the way. How can I get around this?

Here is a screenshot in Windows Disk Management showing the partition layout on my disk: I wish to expand the Windows partition (C:\ drive, "Boot") into the 16 GB of unallocated space. However, ...
Tom Galvin's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
28k views

Cannot convert from MBR to GPT

I want to upgrade my disk from MBR to GPT, and I tried using Windows' MBR2GPT.EXE tool to do the job. I used Windows' DISKPART tool to identify the disk I want to convert. However, this happened: C:\...
J-Cake's user avatar
  • 261
7 votes
2 answers
12k views

how to convert NTFS to ext4 in windows?

I want to convert one partition of my windows which is NTFS (or can be FAT32) to a linux file system partitioning? I'm looking for some tools or ways to do it for me!
aakpro's user avatar
  • 178
6 votes
1 answer
15k views

Will Windows 10's reset delete my Linux partitions?

I want to use the "reset my PC" feature of Windows 10 to wipe the data on my Windows partition. But I have also a Linux system installed, which I want to keep. Will Windows 10's full reset wipe all ...
Hey's user avatar
  • 1,261
0 votes
3 answers
603 views

Ran out of primary partitions, want to install another system

I have a Fedora 18 system installed on my hard disk, but upon installation I created 4 partitions for boot, swap, root and home, and now I want to install Windows on some unallocated space (I need it, ...
ranieri's user avatar
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