All Simple Volumes

[CtrlAltDel]

Windows 7 Service Pack 1

I decided I needed a new partition and have done something that I don't quite understand. The computer still boots up fine and everything seems just as it was, operation wise, but something is not like it was before.

I have a 500GB HD and originally had 3 Primary Partitions.

These were the normal C: drive which I had set to a size of about 50 GB and a B: which was larger at about 400GB for movies and music and a smaller 10GB partition for files and documents.

So, I go to create another small 10GB partition in Computer Management, I right click on the large 400GB partition and select shrink. I shrank it by 10GB and created another partition.

Somehow, and I guess all of you can tell, I am no computer genius; I managed to create the extra needed small 10 GB partition but, I changed all the volumes that were primary partitions into simple volumes in one fell swoop.

Is this a bad thing? What are the advantages/disadvantages to this?

I have no primary partitions at all, just simple volumes.

 

[CtrlAltDel]

Also, all the flash drives are primary partitions. That seems odd to me but, may not be odd at all because I have no idea what I am talking about.

Is it normal for flash drives to be primary partitions?

 

[Ian]

It also looks like you've got your disks set to dynamic, which may be the reason you're seeing these changes.

There's more information on basic/dynamic and primary partitions on this link (more than I can explain in a post). It highlights the changes in dynamic disks and some of the benefits (for example, software RAID and spanned volumes).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363785(v=vs.85).aspx

With dynamic disks, there's no need for "primary" and "extended" partitions ("simple" dynamic volumes are the "primary" equivalent) - so I wouldn't worry about the change. However, there probably isn't a reason for you to use dynamic disks (as far as I can tell), but it won't do you any harm.

Don't worry about your flash drives - that's normal

 

[Nibiru2012]

Actually you now have 5 partitions including the System Reserved partition created by Windows 7 during the install.

Windows 7 only allows up to 4 partitions maximum in the standard mode, that's why it switched to dynamic mode.

 

[CtrlAltDel]

Thanks Ian and Nibiru; you both have been very helpful.