partition issue

[SOSAGES]

hi all,

i have a little problem with a new hard drive its my boot drive its 273.24 GB big.

i have 4 partitions on it currently if you add up all the partition sizes it comes to 259.63 GB. It says it has 44.68 GB unallocated (the bit i want to partition and format) yet the disk is only 273.24 GB big.

259+44 = 303 now i know hard drives are funny things but is there any obvious reason why i cant add a new partition in windows disk manager?

the disk is ntfs and running windows 2003 server and i want to create 5th partition on the disk when i right click the unallocated part of the disk the "new partition" option is greyed out.

Thanks in advance

[chambece]

I think it depend on what sort of partions they are, And I think you can only have 4 (Primary?) partions on a drive.

There is also the complication of how many bytes are in a G./M, is it 1000 or 1024, but if it is saying there is some free space, then I imagine it's the 4 partition problem.

I take it that it's a nominal 300Gb drive, (base 1000), which is displaying in windows as 273.24?
__________________

I think you need to convert one of the partitions to an Extended partiton, which you can then add logical parttions inside that.

Unfortunatly, it still wont include your unpartioned space.

I think that you might be able to extend the last partition to use the free space, then convert it....

[SOSAGES]

hi and thanks..

the partitions are currently:
4 x "basic"
i assume the drive was sold as a 300 gig drive yes but i was aware i was only going to get 280 or so

[jamesclarke555]

Originally Posted by chambece

There is also the complication of how many bytes are in a G./M, is it 1000 or 1024, but if it is saying there is some free space, then I imagine it's the 4 partition problem.

To answer that:

1000 bits = 1 KiloBit
1000 KiloBits = 1 MegaBit
1000 MegaBits = 1 GigaBit and so on...

&

1024 Bytes = 1 KiloByte
1024 KiloBytes = 1 MegaByte
1024 MegaByte = 1 GigaByte and so on...

As there are 8 bits in a byte (by eight).

And yes, you can only create 4 primary partitions per physical hard disk or three primary partitions and one extended partition with unlimited logical drives.

[Aragorn]

If you are never going to put anything other than XP/2000 on that system, you could convert the drive to dynamic (rather than Basic) which gives you more partitioning options. It's a one way only step and won't allow dual booting with Linux, but if you want to use that space and have four primaries ...

Only other option is to move data off fourth partition, drop the partition and recreate as an extended.