Partitioning a hd

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Hi guys,
I'm trying to put in a new hd in my pc, I am trying to partition it to 2 separate parts. But whatever I do partitionmagic leaves an unallocated 7,8 mb. Is this normal? Does the system put info on the hd there or something? Last time I had something like this and I tried to install winxp to a new hd, it kept wining about the hd not starting at the beginning or something. So how do I get rid of that 7,8 mb at the beginning, I did the partitioning 3 times and also tried to resize/move partitions, but it is like a magical 7,8 mb that doesn't go away, so any help is verrRRrry appreciated.

By the way, a link so you can see what I'm talking about:

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/5614/unallocatedhn8.jpg

oh and it's the middle disc, with the letters L and U. I want L to start at the beginning of this hd.
 
This is normal and the space is actually used for system files. You can save more by turning off system restore.
 
It isn't used for system files. And turning off system restore won't do anything. That is just unallocated space that isn't part of a partition, I believe it has to do with cylinder boundaries. In short, its normal to have some unallocated space when dealing with multiple partitions, and at 7.8 megs I wouldn't worry about it.
 
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This is NOT used for system restore! System Restore uses a directory on a partitioned drive to store information.

The slack space at the end is normal. I forget the exact reasoning for it, but IIRC it's related to future partitioning- namely the conversion of a partition to a dynamic partition for Windows.

EDIT: To correct myself, SNGX may be right as well. My head is numb right now. Different partitioning applications handle things differently. Either way, it is definitely normal.

For more (and Gory) information about system restore, see http://128.175.24.251/forensics/restorepoints.htm (From a police forensics site I've referenced before.) Any live linux environment which mounts NTFS should be able to show you this directory, such as Helix. Other live CDs or file system browsers may be able to access this as well- you won't be able to from Explorer by default. Also see http://windowsir.blogspot.com/2006/10/restore-point-forensics.html which is the website of Harlan Carvey, author of the excellent "Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery" book for those interested in such things.
 
I like a clean drive
I use acronis to remove this stupid little space
this was created when using some partitioning software that needed space for a boot utility.
acronis does not do this
thats my story and I'm stick'n to it




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Its not Acronis, its how you partition. Now unfortunately for everyone reading this thread I don't remember, but I've ran into this before with hard drives and partitioning. And You can tweak your partition sizes to eliminate that unallocated space. It has Jack Shi t to do with Windows restore. It is PURELY related to how you have partitioned your drive.

And come on guys, we are talking about less than 8 megs here out of MANY gigs. It simply doesn't matter. If you are pushing your hard drives to the last 8 megs then perhaps you need to cough up some more money for a bigger drive.
 
The main problem is not that I lose space, the main problem is that last time I tried to install winxp to a partition like this it kept refusing because the partition didn't start at the beginning of the hd, or something like that. I had to use another software, powerquest driveimage, to boot my pc with a bootable cd-rom (a powerquest driveimage bootable cd-rom), reallocate the partitions and only after that I was able to install winxp on it. In the meantime I found a way to remove it.

What I did first was I started with one partition, than added another one. That way there was this leftover. But then I decided to partition the whole hd into one partition, I didn't lose 1 bit, and after that I divided it in two. That way I had no problem.
 
what about unwanted highjacking of the space
someone may be able and may have already wrote mal software to find this and use nice place to hide spyware
I'm not worried about space ,just how it gets used
SNGX1275
Misunderstand me Acronis did not do this
I use Acronis to fix
XP or some other software that formats or sets up an OS can do this by making temp Boot area on drive
 
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