Hi. Forgive my ignorance, but my head is starting to spin on this issue. I have been doing the legwork to get ready for a dual boot installation of Slackware and Windows 7 for the second day in a row now (reading manuals, defragmenting disks, backing up and moving things around, etc.), and just when I was about to get things started by resizing my windows partition to make room for Slackware, I discovered that the manufacturer has already put 4 primary partitions on the drive.

There is a system partition, a recovery partition, a normal C: partition where my data is, and also a manufacturer specific "HP Tools" partition that does god only knows what.

So basically I'm just wondering what the easiest way to deal with this might be (other than of course just erasing the entire thing and never looking back, which I unfortunately cannot do).

Can anyone help?

This was all worked out decades ago and I suspect it still works today. Something like this allowed many OS's to be installed. Still claims to work. http://www.osloader.com/ There are a few like it out there too.


You could fool with making hidden partitions too.

Be careful with your data. Might need to make recovery disks right now before it is too late.

Can boot some OS's from logical too.

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Wow, that looks pretty cool actually. I'm downloading a copy for my netbook. As for my issue, before I saw your post, I figured out that the HP Tools partition should work fine as logical and found a windows tool to make it so. Then I realized I could have done the same thing with Gparted, but apparently I'm in Windows mode now . . .

Thanks!

Ah, if only it didn't cost 25 dollars . . . there has to be a better way.