Partitions

[silverwing57]

Could someone please tell me what the difference is between primary, logical and extended partitions? I've got some free space on my hard disk and I'm not sure about which option I should use. I've tried googling it but haven't got many good explanations, thanks in advance.

 

[Trivium Nate]

Primary is the partition that windows is installed onto I think and im not sure about the rest

 

[Raffaz]

Primary partitions can have operating systems on them (your allowed 4 of these with XP) An extended partition is the rest of the disk space, and ya logical partitions are created inside the extended partition. So say you had a 100Gb drive and ya wanted 2 operating systems. You could make 2 x 10Gb primarys. The extended would be 80Gb (to use the remaining space) and then you would create your logical drives inside here (lets say 40Gb for music and 40Gb for films. HTH. Any more questions just ask

 

[silverwing57]

Ah, okay, that helps alot thank you, just a few questions.
Is there any difference between 4 primary's and 2 primary's with a logical drive to each?
Will each partition have a drive letter, I mean will an extended partition and a logical drive share the same drive letter?

Thanks heaps for this by the way.

 

[silverwing57]

Sorry, one more question. If a primary partition is damaged, will any of the extended or logical drives be damaged as well?

 

[Raffaz]

Ah, okay, that helps alot thank you, just a few questions.
Is there any difference between 4 primary's and 2 primary's with a logical drive to each?
Will each partition have a drive letter, I mean will an extended partition and a logical drive share the same drive letter?

Thanks heaps for this by the way.

You cant create a logical drive in a primary partition, they can only be created in the extended partition. Each partition will have a drive letter. If you had an extended drive with 4 logical partitions, then that would create 4 drives (the extended one wouldnt count. Imagine it like this, if ya had a chocolate bar (ya extended partition) and chopped it into 4 pieces (ya logical partitions) ya would only have 4 pieces not 5.

Also worth mentioning the main difference between the primary and logicals are ya use the logical drives mainly for data storage. This is handy if you want to format the primary partition to do a clean install, coz all ya music etc thats on ya logical partitions will still be intact after the clean install

 

[Raffaz]

Sorry, one more question. If a primary partition is damaged, will any of the extended or logical drives be damaged as well?

The chances are that if ya primary partition is damaged then the logical ones will be aswell. They arent actually seperate drives, each partition is just allocated a certain part of the drive, which makes the computer think there are more than one drive. So therefore if one partition is damaged, then the chances are that the drive is damaged. Or it could simply be a corrupt MBR

 

[silverwing57]

Ah, great, thank you so much.