The NT systems can have 4 primary partitions without any problem + extended.
I have never seen any problem with it, or any real reason for doing it.
If there is also a hidden partition, then you would see it in Easus. Notes: There are some tiny portions of unallocated that might not be visually represented in Easus and in disk manager
Mentally I picture many primaries like this.
|---primary---|------Primary-----|------Primary-------||==extended==with logical==||
Being old school and trying to keep the thing as normal and regular as possible i prefer only 1 primary.
What I concider the "normal method" is like this.
|---Primary----|----------The space called extended where Logical Drives are set-------|
Which to us after that is all created looks like this.
|---Primary----||=====Logical============Logical============Logical===all in that ext space=||
|---Primary----||=====Logical=====|=======Logical=====|=======Logical===================||
See the differance? Well dont feel bad because I don't totally understand either.
Right now you can not make a logical without that Extended hole space made First.
Logicals are all created IN the extended space. A primary does not use the extended space method. Until you or the progam remove or move any primaries that are in the way, and create or enlarge an extended space, you will not be able to put Logicals INTO the extended space.
Without a backup, and knowing that primaries ARE a workable method, the least would be a clone backup of the whole drive before proceeding. Most methods for partition conversion, require entire re-write of the data, and messing with the partition table. they wouldnt let ME do that without a backup :-) so why trust software .
Are you doing this from your Linux OS or from a Live CD? Typically gparted does not let you do major changes to partitions until they are unmounted.
If this is the issue, a Live CD usage should let you resize the extended partition, move the ntfs one and then resize the ext4 one.
Best Answer
You can convert primary to logical and vice-versa using my FixParts program. Many Linux distributions provide it in the
gdiskorgptfdiskpackage; the command name isfixparts. There are some caveats, though; namely, you need to have at least one free (unallocated) sector immediately preceding every to-be-logical partition. It's unclear if you've got such a free sector before your current/dev/sda2. If not, the safest way to create such a gap is to use GParted to shrink/dev/sda1(that's/dev/sda1, not/dev/sda2) by the smallest amount possible -- probably 1MiB. That will open a gap between/dev/sda1and/dev/sda2, which will enable FixParts to convert/dev/sda2from primary to logical. Note that you'll need to do all of this (or at least the GParted operations) from a live CD; GParted won't let you operate on partitions that are currently mounted, as/dev/sda1must be if you boot from it.