[RESOLVED] Volume

Oh God! Not him again?

Unfortunately, yes! I have been searching the internet but am unable to find an answer that I actually understand.

With my XP installation, the first hdd has six partitions. XP/MyDocs/PhotoWorking/Temp/ProgramDownloads/ ATI Image. It has always worked as it should.

With the new W7 install, I have a new 2tb hdd and am trying to create the same partitions, albeit, larger, using paragon partition manager.

I now have five and a 750gb 'unallocated' space. I cannot un-allocate it because I cannot see how; all help tells me is that I have the allocated number of partitions.

The disk is listed as basic and the first partition, which will hold the W7 os, is listed as active.

How can I reclaim and format this space?

Probably what is adding to my confusion is that I don't understand the difference between primary, logical and extended.

Many thanks and toodle pip

You can either have 4 primary partitions OR 3 primaries and 1 extended. The extended partition would then be broken into logical partitions.

In your case, you would need to make 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition. Then you create 2 logical partitions in the extended partition.

https://www.howtogeek.com/184659/beg...ons-explained/

Primary, active, inactive, logical, extended. I have some kinda mental block; may be a covid related mental glitch.

will see if my partition software can change the layout, if not, reformat the entire hdd which is empty and start from zero.

Thanks, will update when done.

As I understand it, formatting with GPT would solve the problem, but the BIOS has to boot from UEFI (or whatever) and as far as I can find, my ageing Dell does not have the BIOS option.

I highly doubt you have a UEFI system if you were previously using it for XP. UEFI is the replacement for BIOS, not an option in it. You must have UEFI to boot from a GPT drive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifie...ware_Interface

I'm not sure why you need so many partitions. At most, I just create 1 for OS and 1 for Data.

Thanks for the advice, managed to get all the partitions arranged.

Why so many? Obviously the os and My Docs. Then the largest with is a Photo working area before the photos get archived to back-up disks. i also have downloaded films stored. then a small partition for os temp files, as try not to read/write/delete from the os more than is necessary. A partition for program downloads, which if I like, I keep, if not .....! And finally, a partition for the image of C: This usually has around the last three images. As a back-up, I also keep the similar image files on another hdd.

My other hdd are for back-ups. I use a program called File Hamster that backs-up all the MyDoc files on the fly and that fills a partition of another hdd, surprisingly quickly.

It may be a bit ott but it all works for me.