Installing Gentoo on a laptop with Windows 7. How to reduce the railway under Win7?

Question

linux

There is a laptop with hdd - 500 Gb. By means of Windows 7 left two partitions.
Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.
I left the SYSTEM and Windows partitions, 1GB and 228GB, respectively.
win7 disk management shows 3 partitions. Last 236.21 GB Good (Main partition) unformatted.

I boot further from the flash drive to Linux, fdisk shows 4 primary partitions (3 ntfs partitions and one fat32 - as it was originally). There is no free space and I can not create a primary partition for Linux.
Why does Windows show one thing and Linux fdisk another? How to allocate space for linux?
Tried under win7 Partition Wizard. Shows just like win7 disk management utility.
Farther. I also tried formatting a flash drive under win. So after that, fdisk on another computer with Linux sees this flash drive as 10Mb. And the same win7 as a normal 16 GB and writes data.

Answer 1

In general, I understand what's going on. On the laptop SSD + HDD and Intel Rapid Technology. Those. under win7 the disk is in RAID0, where in the sdd + hdd array. And sdd is a buffer for hdd. The latest research ended with the fact that Gentoo saw the raid through mdadm. But imsm could not read the table properly. Now I turned off the raid, while windows7 remained, though it felt like it was working more slowly. Installed gent, overwrote grub. Everything is working. In the future, I plan to migrate the Gent system completely to ssd, and leave hdd for data (/ home, / var) and leave windows (I use windows very rarely). Everything is working. But support for Intel's imsm in the kernel and mdadm is implemented crookedly and incompletely.

Answer 2

In disk management, leave not three partitions, but two partitions (boot windows, windows + data - this is what you have now) and free space. It is on this free space that Gentoo will stand up and format it itself as it wants during the installation.
In nix, you see three partitions from your HDD and one partition from a USB drive, which is generally logical.