1 Topic by Wimme

  • Wimme
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  • Registered: 2007-10-02
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Topic: Partition my Dell Notebook

Hello there!

I hope you can help me. I just bought a new Dell Notebook Inspiron 1520 with Windows Vista Home Premium. I want to create at least one new partition such as "Data".

I used the Vista Tool to shrink C by 50+GB (it wouldn' let me shrink it more. Why?) and tried to allocate the new space to a new partition called data. The currenct sitution and the error message is on this picture:
http://img210.imageshack.us/my.php?imag … ungau9.jpg

(I would translate it like that: "there is at least one drive not having enough space to finsih this process"

As you can see I have 4 primary partitions and can't creat a further one.
1. What are the 110MB for? (Somebody told me it's for a diagnosis but can be deleted because it's on my Vista DVD.
2. What are the 2.5GB for? I have read it's important for some buttons and dell media direct to work
3. The recovery partition just includes an image from dell, right? I could delete it but would have to install Vista from the DVD on my own.

Vista would not let me to delete the 110MB with its tool and I couldn't find the option just to create a logical partition.

Finally I created a gparted liveCD Version 0.3.4.8 and had a look at the situation and took a screenshot. Problem: I can't find that saved screenshot. It teels me it's in root, but I don't know where that would be. Probably that just applies for systems running linux?

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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  • Registered: 2007-05-25
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Re: Partition my Dell Notebook

Root is a part of the Linux file system. In the case of Gparted LiveCD it is located entirely in the RAM, because Gparted doesn't mount any partition by default. It disappears when you power down the computer. So, you have to save it on another unit (floppy disk, external drive, usb stick... ). This is done from a terminal (command window). It is discussed in the documentation
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/documentation.php

About the partitions:
I can't know if you can erase the various dell partitions.
There is no file system for 2 of them.
The 110 MB partition is probably needed by some BIOS tool.
I think you have to find information on the specific partitions in some Dell user forum. You could even solve the problem if one of those partitions can be located as logical partition in an extended partition.

In that case you could copy (backup) that partition in an external drive unit, create the extended partition and copy the backed up partition back into the extended partition.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***