Hello,

I have a desktop computer which I replaced with a laptop. The desktop had a 500gb SATA disk which had one primary partition (system) and one extended partition divided into several logical drives. I dual-booted Vista and Linux Ubuntu.

Now the 500gb SATA disk is connected as an external HDD (inside an eSATA box) to my laptop.

I want to have the 500gb disk contain only one storage partition and nothing else. I have already moved most of the files I want to keep to one of the logical drives I had on the extended partition. Using Vista Disk Management on the laptop, I have deleted the primary partition of the external disk as well as all except two of the logical drives, including the Ubuntu partitions. (One of the remaining logical drives has stuff I want to keep but doesn't fit to the other logical drive, which is why I haven't yet deleted it.)

Here is a picture of what it looks like in Disk Management:

In the picture, Disks 0 and 1 are inside the laptop and were preconfigured as shown in the pic. Disk 2 is the 500gb external disk.

Now, if I try to use Disk Management to extend the logical drive (J:) to contain all the space available, first I get a notice saying that the selected basic disk will be converted to a dynamic disk. Now I don't know why it would be converted to a dynamic disk, but when click "Yes" upon being asked whether I'm sure I want to continue, I get this error message:

Disk Management says:


Referring to Disk Management help was of no use, so I'll refer to here instead. How do you suggest I continue here? What do I have to do to make the external drive contain only one storage partition to act as a storage drive for my laptop? Do I have to backup everything on the disk to another disk, wipe the disk clean and then reformat it, or can I just extend a partition?

Thanks.

Hi .

Just guessing, but...

First, I have no experience with Vista.

Unless something changed with Vista...the problem is that you have an extended partition and logical drives within that one primary partitions. These must be unfolded in the same manner that they were created. Before you can use the unallocated space outside of the extended partition...you must take care of everything inside that extended partition.

The free space inside the extended partition...is reflected as "free space" because it's all part of the extended partition. AFAIK, free space cannot be moved around by Disk Management...free space is not the same as unallocated space.

I don't know if Vista's Disk Management allows for backward adjustment of partition sizes, I only know that XP's is forward only. If it did...you could try to extend the size of the extended partition...but you'd still have the problem with free space within the extended partition .

What I would suggest: Move all data from the drive which you want to change (temporarily)...delete that whole mess...create new primary partitions (don't bother with extended/logical ones) on the drive (maximum of 4)...move your data back to the new partitions.

OR...use something like Partition Magic 8.0 or higher to accomplish what you seem to desire. Not sure if the extended/logical partition thing is a problem with PM 8...I haven't used logical partitions since Win 98.

Louis

Hmm.. I guess it's the best and simplest solution to backup what I want to keep and wipe it clean, as you suggested. I got the same recommendation on another thread elsewhere. Though I'll have to delete some files and later download them from the net or copy from backup dvd's because otherwise I couldn't fit everything onto the laptop hard disk. I'm glad the 500gb disk wasn't quite so full as it could've been.

Thanks.

Easily done , happy computing.

Louis