How can one create 4 primary MBR partitons in Win7?

[DiracDeBroglie]

Hi,

On my 2TB external drive, in a USB enclosure, I can create 4 primary MBR partitions using my WinXP laptop, it's just that the partitions are not aligned with respect to the 4K physical sectors in the 2TB drive. So, in order to ensure alignement, I have to create the 4 primary MBR partitions on my Win7 laptop.

However, the Disk management (DM) in Win7 creates the 4th MBR partition automatically as an extended partition, and I don't want that: I want 4 primary MBR partitions under Win7.

Question now is, how can one create 4 primary MBR partitions under Win7 using the graphical interface of Disk Management?? Is there a trick somehow to the job??

I could also initilize the drive as GPT, then I can go up to 128 primary partitions, but the thing is that the drive must be usable on my WinXP laptop. So, as my WinXP laptop cannot even see any GPT drive, I have to stick to MBR mode.

johan

[cluberti]

You can't - it creates the 4th as a logical extended partition automatically so that you can create more partitions inside the logical partition. If you want 4 *primary* partitions, you have to use diskpart.

[DiracDeBroglie]

Any idea about links, websites, docs, which explain in a easy to read and quick fashion how to create basic (primary, extended and logical) partitions using Diskpart? I've been surfing in the help command of Dispart.exe cmd terminal but I have to say user-friendlyness is not the strongest point of diskpart.

johan

[cluberti]

User-friendliness isn't one of diskpart's goals - it's meant to be a scriptable environment for modifying disks, and also for use on core versions of Windows Server that have no UI (there are other reasons for diskpart to exist, as not everything you can do in diskpart can you do in disk management).

As to creating partitions, you would run diskpart via the diskpart command from an elevated cmd prompt, then you would select the disk to be partitioned:

list disk
sel disk <disk # from list>

If the selected disk has data you wish to destry, you can use the clean command to do so:

help clean

Once you've selected the disk, you create partitions using the create partition (create par) commands:

help create par pri

From there, you can now manipulate the volumes in disk management. You can also use the volume commands (help vol) in diskpart to do it manually, if you so prefer.