All Simple Volumes

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.

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?

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/libr...(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

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.

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