Solved Unable to create a partition in windows 8.1

Andromyde

New Member
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6
I need to create a partition on my PC and I've followed tutorials but I always run into the same problem: Right clicking a volume in disk management only gives me a "help" option. I've connected external storage and it gives me the menu shown in the tutorials/how-tos.

Is there something I'm missing? I've followed all the steps to the letter, save for the ones that are not possible on my PC (shrink volume/etc)


Additional info:
PC is an Acer Aspire V3-551 laptop
The HD was replaced a few months ago and the original OS updated to 8.1 from 8
 

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My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1
I notice the C: partition shows as "OEM". That may mean Acer has put certain restrictions on it to keep folks from changing it.

It also looks like the partition is listed twice in the top section of the attachment, once as an NTFS partition, and once without. Since I have no experience with how Acer sets up their systems, do you remember if this is how it was set up when you got it? Did an 8.1 update add the 350 MB partition, or was it there originally?

If you want to give the partition a quick look, open an administrative command prompt and start Diskpart. You would then need to select the disk and then the specific partition. Once the partition is selected, you can run a detail partition command and see what the partition ID and attributes are.

Diskpart
lis dis
sel dis 0
lis par
sel par 3
det par

The drive number selected as 0 will depend on the listing from the first command. The partition, will of course depend on what the lis par command shows.

A normal OS partition will show as below. Yours will probably have some difference in the Type or Attrib settings.

DISKPART> det par

Partition 4
Type : ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7
Hidden : No
Required: No
Attrib : 0000000000000000
Offset in Bytes: 553648128

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
* Volume 1 C Windows 8_1 NTFS Partition 149 GB Healthy Boot
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home Grown
    CPU
    i7 3770K
    Motherboard
    ASUS P8Z77 -v Pro, Z87-Expert
    Memory
    16 G
    Graphics Card(s)
    EVGA GTX 680 Classified (2)
    Hard Drives
    Kingston SSD 240 GB
@Saltgrass

Looks to me, there are partitions missing.

Base OEM manufacturer's partition layout.

Screenshot is NOT ACER.

OEMup8-1-0001-1.PNG
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    ME, XP,Vista,Win7,Win8,Win8.1
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    Other Info
    Notebooks x 3

    Desktops x 5

    Towers x 4
@Saltgrass

Thank you for your time. I'm sorry to say I never looked into this stuff before the update--being pretty new to this stuff I never thought to look at any of this until I went to make a partition (to dual boot with Linux Mint). This is really vexing.
I tried to install Linux mint inside windows and hoped it would create it's own partition as it did for a friend but that seems to have failed--it tells me to insert a windows disc when I try boot in Linux. And there are no new partitions (but I wasn't clear on whether it was supposed to create one) That's probably unrelated, but I felt it was worth mentioning in case it wasn't

Here's what I got in command prompt:







Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 System 300 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 Reserved 128 MB 301 MB
Partition 3 Primary 697 GB 429 MB
Partition 4 Recovery 350 MB 698 GB


and


Partition 3
Type : ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7
Hidden : No
Required: Yes
Attrib : 0X8000000000000001
Offset in Bytes: 449839104


There is no volume associated with this partition.

@Theog

Should I be worried? I feel like I should be worried




Thanks again to both of you for your help and time..this is becoming a pretty big setback for me
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1
It doesn't look like your configuration is an Acer one, as Theog points out. So I would go back to that same partition and change the attributes to match a normal OS partition.

gpt attributes=0x0000000000000000

16 zeros after the x.....

If you intend on shrinking the OS partition and adding another one, the little testing I have done on that seems to indicate a new partition would be numbered after the others and should maintain your Recovery options... but I really can't guarantee it.

If you are going to go with Linux, does Mint have a UEFI install because I know Ubuntu 13.04 or later does.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home Grown
    CPU
    i7 3770K
    Motherboard
    ASUS P8Z77 -v Pro, Z87-Expert
    Memory
    16 G
    Graphics Card(s)
    EVGA GTX 680 Classified (2)
    Hard Drives
    Kingston SSD 240 GB
I tried to edit the attributes but command prompt would have none of it. Also tried shrinking/partitioning through DISKPART. Didn't work. I did find a way to get my hard drive partitioned and now I feel kind of dumb.
I ended up just downloading and trying a partitioning tool and it worked like a charm.
Thanks for all the help though. I did learn a few things, at least!
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1
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