I was about to install Ubuntu on my Win 7 HP6550b laptop, dual boot, when I came up against a problem. The Ubuntu installation says that the partition which I have put aside for it is unusable.
After reading around it seems that I have already reached the 4-partition limit of the Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme.
Windows does indeed show four existing partitions, each of them primary. They are:
- c:\ drive. Main partition. NTFS. 400 Gb.
- HP Recovery. NTFS. 15 Gb.
- HP Tools. FAT32. 2 Gb.
- System. NTFS. 0.3 Gb.
Can I remove any of partitions 2, 3 or 4? What would the impact be? Or am I better to change one to a logical partition?
Best Answer
Partition 4 contains critical system files. If you remove it, Windows 7 will stop working.
Partition 2 contains recovery information to set your computer back to the status quo if you need to reinstall Windows 7. If you already made your Recovery Disk, you can remove this one. But I would advise against it.
Note that the 4-partitions-per-disk limit only applies to primary partitions. You can create an extended partition and several logical partitions inside. You would have to convert on of your partitions to logical to do so, since an extended partition is a primary partition.