Saturday, October 5, 2019

hard drive - No free mbr slots while there should be


I have three partitions on my hard drive. including the system reserved partition, there are 4 Primary partitions and I cant have any more. But I want to have one 110GB Primary partition.(I want to dual boot Linux Mint with windows)


So , using easeUS , I resized one of my partitions to have a 110GB unallocated space. When I wanted to add partition in that space the app told me to make the partition that was shrunk, Logical. so I did that. added the new partition and applied the changes.


Now i have 3 primary partitions, and two Logical ones.


The problem is that when I want change that 110GB partition to Primary it tells me that there are no MBR slots. But there are only 3 Primary partitions and I should be able to do that.


what am i doing wrong?


Or are there any other ways to have that Primary partition.


Answer



It's not MBR *"slots", but entries.
There are a total of four partition entries in the MBR.



Now i have 3 primary partitions, and two Logical ones.



So that is a total of four partition entries: three primary partitions (that you are aware of) and one extended partition that contains the two logical partitions.



what am i doing wrong?



You're ignoring the existence of the extended partition, which occupies one of the four partition entries.



Or are there any other ways to have that Primary partition



Four entries is the MBR limit.



But I want to have one 110GB Primary partition.(I want to dual boot Linux Mint with windows)



You do not need a primary partition to install Linux.
You can install Linux in logical partitions. GRUB does not require the Linux OS to be installed in a primary partition, and the Linux OS installer can use logical partitions for the root filesystem as well as the swap partition.


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