Medion Hard Drive 1 TB.

peterx

Hi,
Can anybody help.
My pc is.AKOYA P5315 d MD 8351.
I should like to dual boot with my windows 7. with windows 8.preview.
My hard drive is split beetween C drive and D drive.C is slit in to two partitions.One very small and a large one.D is the recovery section and its also split into two partitions.
My problem is when i try to make a new partition from free space on C im told their are no free MBR slots.Now can i delete the recovery partition D as Ive got the recovery disk and application and support disk.With these disks can i restore windows 7 from scratch without the D recovery partition. Any help would be appreciated.

fwor

peterx wrote: »

can i delete the recovery partition D as Ive got the recovery disk and application and support disk.

You need to be careful there - in some (most?) cases the recovery CD/DVD is not an installation disk, but simply a tool to let you use what's on the Recovery partition on the hard disk.

Are you sure about the number of partitions? Under normal circumstances you would expect to have only two partitions - one for the C drive and the other for the D drive. It's also possible that you have four partitions of which two are "hidden" and so not mapped to a drive by Windows.

What you need to do is to resize the C drive partition to make it smaller and free up unpartitioned space, and then create a new partition in that space.

peterx

Thanks for answer.Thats exactly what i did with the C drive and ended up with 500 GB of free space i could not use.I then merged it back with the C drive.There are definitely two partitions on both drives.Thanks for your help but i think its too much of a chance to destroy Recovery drive.I just wanted to dual boot windows 7 and the new windows 8.
Thanks.

fwor

Ah Ok - it looks as though you may already have four primary partitions, which would lead to the error message about no free MBR slots.

It would be worth finding out what all 4 partitions are for, as if it's possible to delete one you will free up a MBR so that when you re-size the C drive partition it will let you create a new one in the free space.

Take a look in Disk Management if you haven't already - it may give some clues as to what each partition is used for.

spud17

Win7 has a 'System Reserved' partition of 100MB, approx 30MB used, situated before C:. This should not be touched.

peterx

Thanks for all your answers but i don't think i dare touch the D recovery partitions. Indeed i have a small 100MB adjacent to the main C drive. Ridiculous that i have 1TB hard drive and cant split it up for other operating systems to be installed.

fwor

spud17 wrote: »

Win7 has a 'System Reserved' partition of 100MB, approx 30MB used, situated before C:. This should not be touched.

Thanks - I know too little about Vista and 7. Hopefully I'll commit that fact to memory and not trash someone's system by deleting that partition.

Still seems to leave one partition unaccounted for though... In older versions it was not possible to have more than one partition per drive letter. Is this possible with Win7?

debitcardmayhem

I have "experimented" with the developers version 8 using Virtualbox on Win7 and Linux using Virtualbox , that may give you a flavour . I Also use gparted from a linux live usb (eg systemrescuecd or from the gparted live iso too) to repartition my disks, but you need to have some degree of confidence in using partition toools and a good full system backup of the whole disk if you are not as foolhardy as I . Try virtualbox first, it is a good option for a non-destructive way of testing but so far I am not impressed with 8 but been away on 3 weeks hols and it may have moved on a bit since.

peterx

Thanks i cant image my pc because i have nowhere to store it. Must get external drive.

debitcardmayhem

peterx wrote: »

Thanks i cant image my pc because i have nowhere to store it. Must get external drive.

OK but give Virtualbox a try it runs a tad slower depending on the ram and how much you dedicate to the VM.. but I haven't had too much time yet to try 8, been enjoying the holidays since I downloaded it. I have tried it with 1GB virtual on a 4GB base lappy and it is fast enough for tasting/testing.

peterx

I will give Virtual Box a try Thanks.