Windows 7 Confusion About Logical Partition Properties and Usage in Windows 7

You might want to give us more info about your system. A normal Windows 7 MBR install does not have two unlabeled partitions. OEM installs might have an extra partition and UEFI installs will have a System and MSR.

I will normally stay away from Logical Partitions if at all possible. But since you already have 3 primary partitions, if you wanted to add more than the one additional (total of 4), you would need it for a Legacy install. I would not however, be using a third party partition manager for such a task. Not saying it is a bad idea, just not necessary.

A snipping tool picture of your Disk Management Window, attached with the paper clip on Advanced Replies, might help us see the situation.

Thanks for the reply, I don't believe it's the MBR, but really I don't know. I was going on what I was told on another forum (unless I misunderstood them) that Win7 has 2 segments (or partitions) used by the system in addition to the C (boot) drive. ALSO I was errant in my description of them above, they are not "unlabeled" as I said, but rather just don't have drv letters assigned to them. They don't show up in a file handler. I don't know what kind of format they have either.

I don't have a screen grabber installed yet but for what's it's worth this is what I have so far.

Win7 Partitions existing when laptop purchased and created.

I assume that the 1st 2 (non-drive letter) segments are treated by most partition apps as actual partitions ? And for that matter they may very well be but have modified attributes by Win7 ? (i.e. no drv letter etc)

I assume this because when I had the 2 above said segments plus the active primary C drv and 1 extended partition Z drv, I then attempted to create another partition and my partition App baulked saying there were no more partitions available for the HD.

So it appeared it read the 2 win7 system non drive letter segments as actual partitions, thereby fulfilling the max of 4 partitions.

I was able however to dynamic resize the extended partition into another logical drv, which I did.

My HD as it is now (the 4th partition is an extended one with 2 logical drives Z and
Y).

18gb Recovery Partition | 100mb System Reserve Partition | C: Primary
Active | Z: DynamicData | Y: StaticStorage

Excuse my ignorance of not knowing bout the snipping tool, here is a snip for your viewing.