1
Here's a screenshot of my partition layout as seen by GParted:
There are three primary partitions and an extended partition (it's a MBR disk) that contains two logical disks, some unallocated space and one more logical disk.
Now, here's the same disk as seen by Windows:
Four primary partitions, then an extended partition containing one logical disk and unallocated space, then one more primary partition. That's 6 top-level partitions, while MBR allows only four.
What causes this anomaly? How can I diagnose it? How can I fix it?
Here's fdisk -l
output:
Disk /dev/sda: 298,1 GiB, 320072933376 bytes, 625142448 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x7a675f3e
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 83888127 83886080 40G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 83888128 92276735 8388608 4G 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 * 92276736 251660287 159383552 76G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 251660288 625141759 373481472 178,1G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 251662336 293605375 41943040 20G 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 293607424 377493503 83886080 40G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda7 608364544 625141759 16777216 8G 83 Linux
Additional information:
- All partitions except
sda6
were created under Linux before Windows was installed.sda6
(the sole logical disk detected by Windows) was created later using Disk Management. It already displayed all partitions as primary prior to that. - When I installed Windows to
sda3
,sda5
disappeared from the partition table. It wasn't wiped, when I recreated it without formatting the data was still there. Then I installed Windows onsda3
again andsda5
disappeared, just like before. - Windows detects this disk as MBR.
- It's Windows 7 Professional 32-bit with all updates installed.