"Hidden" disk partition?

Kinda unsure where to put this post, but since I discovered it trying to install XP, I figured I'd post it here.
When I arrived at the "What partition do you want to use..." screen I saw what was called an unnamed partition on my laptop's hard drive. It was only 7MB big. The drive is correctly listed as 5370MB but the parition that had data was 5263MB. I tried to delete the 7MB partition and it wouldn't let me. I deleted the 5263MB partition and the choose for partitions to use changed to 5370MB. I ran FDISK trying to get rid of it, and the only partition that showed up was also listed as 5263MB. I deleted the partition and reformatted the drive but even then when formatting it said 5263MB.
Where is the 7MB partition coming from or why is it there or should it be there?! Why won't it go away when I FDISK and format the drive?

 

Modern hard drives use some of their own space to enable them to function up to their specifications and provide for the eventualities of diverse system usage. It's just part of the price you pay for progress.

 

What would you consider 'modern'?
This drive's not THAT new...

 

Joe, I think I'm wrong about that, it may well be something to do with formatting in the NTFS method. I'll look around for more info.

I noticed both my drives had 7 megs. unallocated space also. They were originally formatted in NTFS but I changed them to FAT32 using Partition Magic. I just used PM again to swallow up that 7 megs and put it into an existing partition on the secondary drive. It worked like a champ, so I'll now do it to the boot drive when I get around to it.

It has to be an NTFS requirement but I can't be sure until I see it from a reliable source. I hate being wrong but ignorant is even worse.

 

i think u'll find out that it's a system volume created by a partitioning program.......generally via a multi-boot config scenario.

 

I have much more than 7mb of memory installed...

 

I run (4) hard-drives and all of them have the "7.8 partition unallocated" space on them except HD :0 (meaning the first primary HD).

Run the partitionMagic "partinfo" and send it to PowerQuest for there review and answer....

 

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prkb_cnc_xlxw.asp

 

Thanks for that Dorfmann. It sounds like XP formatting is doing some behind the scenes work that isn't widely known.

If seems to fit what we see as unallocated space since a cylinder is roughly defined as:

As I mentioned before, I was able to get rid of that unallocated space and incorporate it into the other partitions by using PM 8 so I suppose I won't be able to create Dynamic Disks now. I don't think I'll lose much sleep over that.