Non OS partition has status "System"...

[Nowhere]

Second part of reinstall adventures...

Last time I reinstalled, I ended up with bizzare partition layout...

NTFS partition, on which there is OS (and will be) is described as "Boot" partition in Disk Management. FAT32 partition with data is described as..."System"... (might be a product of the thing that I've had there remains of old win98 install in of the catalogues?).
And apparently because of that NTFS partition ended as "E" and FAT32 as "C", which I wouldn't like this time.

Is there any failproof way of making sure that the data partition won't be locked in this "System" state?...other than deleting it.

[DJ]

Seems like you are installing on a drive that had a restore partition on it. That would be the system partition.

[Nowhere]

Not really...on the partition described as "system" in Disk Manager were always only my data (plus, at the time of last reinstall two years ago, folder with remains of win98 install)

[DJ]

I have had that problem in the past and the only way I could get around that is to backup and then delete the partitions. If you find another way be sure to post.

[rylan]

Probably because the FAT32 partition is labeled as primary and bootable/active.
You might have to change it through FDISK, but change it to an extended partition instead of primary/bootable.

[Nowhere]

Yes, it is "primary", as are all three (why the outermost FAT32 partition was labelled "system" when there are no weird things with second inner NTFS one?)

And...is such operation possible without touching data on the partition?

[rylan]

You'd need to use something like partition magic to avoid nuking the data thats there. Fdisk blows everything away if you make any changes. Same with disk manager I think.

[Taz]

And this is on a single hard disk system?

[Nowhere]

Yep.

[Nowhere]

Update: even though disk menager in Windows shows all partitions as "primary", partitioning tools in few Linux distrubutions I've tried show the NTFS partition with Windows as beeing on extended disk...
I might try some LiveCD with GParted...

[Nowhere]

I menaged to deal with the problem, and as requsted, provide description:


Overall it seems that Windows installer assumes that there can only be one primary partition on the drive; even changing flag of partition with data to "non boot" didn't help.

However...all I've had to do is partition the drive using 3rd party tool, in my case GParted (from Knoppix LiveDVD).
Note: Windows installer also can't handle "raw" partition, without filesystem (wants to delete them and create one itself...and we're at the beginning), so you have to format them also, I've used NTFS formatting under GParted but I assume any filesystem recogniseable by Windows installer would do - when it recognises filesystem, you can reformat the partition by Windows installer anyway.

So now I have 3 primary partitions on my HDD, one normal with Windows install, and two other without any unusual flags