How to make more than 4 primary partitions.?

Question

Hello.

- I had windows 7 installed on my pc, and i used computer management to resize my disk.
- So i basically had 3 primary partions which are "C: 584GB Healthy (Boot,Pagefile,Crash Dump,Primary Partition), and 1.46GB Healthy (Active,Recovery Partition), and also another recovery partition which is labeled as 10.62GB Healthy (Active,Primary Partition)
- When i resized it, i had 180GB of unallocated space taken from the c drive, so i wanted to use this space to create three extra primary partitions. (One for Ubuntu, One for backtrack, and one for installing mac osx mountain lion)
- I created the first one which is 40GB and installed Ubuntu, and now i have 4 primary partitions.
- I went to create another one for installing the new operating systems but there was an error about not having enough diskspace, which turned out to be that i cannot make more than 4 primary partitions.

- So the question is, can i make more than 4 primary partitions for windows (Not extended,Not Logical)
- If not, then will my computer boot normally after deleting recovery partitions, also can i convert
the recovery partitions to logical or extended ones...
- At last if making more than 4 primary partitions is not possible in windows, than can i make it Ubuntu
(suggest helpful rograms if u know any)

THANK YOU.....

Answer 1

there is a limit of 4 primary partitions on one hard drive,



but you can have 3 primary and one extended, which can contain as many logical partitions as you wish,



windows can only be installed and will only boot from a primary partition,



linux does not care,



my operating system hard drive has only an extended partition with logical partitions where my linux is installed

Answer 2

Linux doesn't have any problem booting off of extended/logical partitions.



The MBR format doesn't support more than 4 paritions (not enough space allocated in the format specification)



You may be able to convert to GPT whose real limits exceeds most practical limits (99 primary partitions)



You can also use clonezilla to back up the restore partition to a separate disk.

Answer 3

As I recall, more than 4 primary partitions is not possible in Linux, either.



I am not entirely sure how recovery partitions work in Windows but it will boot just fine without. I reused one for Linux on one machine no problem.

Answer 4

I would think you could do it by changing the partition type in the MBR and having it an unknown partition within the BOOT LOADER change it back to boot from it while changing one of the other to unknown



http://www.4shared.com/folder/hNpULkAO/_online.html



I have some old stuff for xp and dos for working with creation of your own boot loader.