Creating Logical Drives In An Extended Partition

I know, this is getting repetitive, but here we go again with the Wizard to complete this two step process of Extended partition and Logical drive creation. Since we're creating a Logical drive, right click the Free Space in the new Extended partition [Fig. 01] and select [New Logical Drive...] to once again launch the Wizard. I promise this will be over soon.

Fig. 01

The Welcome to the New Partition Wizard [Fig. 02] will open and provide some basic information about what can be accomplished with the Wizard.

Fig. 02

Unlike the previous sections of this article where Primary and Extended partitions were valid selections, because I'm working within an Extended partition the only available option is to create a Logical drive. Click [Next] as shown in Fig. 03 to continue.

Fig. 03

Remember that we are in part two of a two step process. In this part we are creating the Logical drive, not the Extended partition. At this point you have a choice between making the Logical drive equal to the size of the Extended partition  - or - making it smaller than the size of the Extended partition. I've opted for the first option by setting the size to 4997 MB. The minimum and maximum size values are shown [Fig. 04] so it's only a matter of typing in the desired  size. It's worth noting that the New Partition Wizard works in megabytes (MB) rather than gigabytes (GB) so adjust your thinking accordingly before entering a number or you're likely to end up with a partition that's sized much differently than what you intended. Entering a decimal point will return an error massage.

Fig. 04

Disk Management automatically offers to assign the next available drive letter to the new partition. Use the drop down selector to choose a different letter. If you're using the NTFS file system the Mount option will be available. Mounted drives are beyond the scope of this article, but the Help section of Microsoft Management Console provides information on their use. If you find the use of drive letters to be restrictive in the type of system you run it's well worth reading about mounted NTFS drives. The option is also available not to specify any drive letter or path.

Fig. 05

The final step  [Fig. 06] is to select the formatting options for the partition. It's not absolutely necessary to format the partition if you're just setting up a partition scheme that will be used later. If so, select the first option. If the partition is formatted at this time the drop down boxes are used to select the file system type and allocation unit size. Unless you have a specific reason to use FAT32 or change the allocation unit the defaults will work fine. Supply a label for the volume now (I used Data Files) or just accept the default. If you want to save some time use the quick format option.

Fig. 06

Review the selected settings [Fig. 07] and click the [Finish] button. The process will begin immediately with no further user intervention.

Fig. 07

The Wizard has completed and the second step of the two step process is complete. Using the color coded key [Fig. 08] at the bottom you can see that a Logical drive has been created using drive letter E: and contains 4.88 GB of NTFS formatted space ready for data storage. The Unallocated Space remains unchanged because the Logical drive was created inside the Extended partition.

Fig. 08