Preparing a new hard drive

[LuDaCriS66]

Can someone explain what the difference is between primary and logical partitions?

I got a new hard drive today.. just plugged it in as a slave right now.... it hasn't been formatted yet or anything. How should I go upon getting this drive ready?

I will be using this drive to boot.. it is a WD 800JB btw.

 

[bjc112]

Originally posted by: LuDaCriS66
Can someone explain what the difference is between primary and logical partitions?

I got a new hard drive today.. just plugged it in as a slave right now.... it hasn't been formatted yet or anything. How should I go upon getting this drive ready?

I will be using this drive to boot.. it is a WD 800JB btw.

If your using the drive to boot, just boot from your CD-rom and install the OS, if u can't install from CD, just boot from a floppy...

oh yeah!

you gotta format...



Good Luck

 

[Pariah]

A primary partition is a bootable partition. So, if you want your new drive to be bootable you have to create a primary partition on it. If you want more than one partition on the drive then you will need to create an extended partition in addition to the primary you created. The extended should contain all the free space left over after creating the primary partition no matter how many additional partitions you want. You cannot format an empty extended partiton or assign a drive letter to it, so after it is created then you have create logical partition(s) within the extended to make the space useable.

 

[MSantiago]

A hard drive can only have 4 primary partitions, no matter what format they're in. You can make one extended partition (which counts as one primary partition), though, and create as many logical drives as you want inside that extended partition. The big disadvantage is that you can't boot from a logical partition (at least not without any proprietary boot manager software), so an OS will need to reside on a primary.

 

[Pariah]

A HD can only have one primary partition. A primary is a primary and that's it, extended is not a primary nor are logical parititions primary.

Edit: I should add, the above referring to how Fdisk labels parititions, which basically everyone uses. You cannot have more than 1 DOS primary partition on a disk.

 

[MSantiago]

1 primary DOS partition is a limitation of FDISK, but using FIPS, NT/2K/XP's Disk Manager, etc., you can create up to 4 primary partitions (all 4 of which can be FAT16/32). A primary partition is a partition that's not contained inside an extended partition. But yes, the extended partition as a whole is a primary partition and does count towards the limit of 4. It would be more accurate to say that each physical drive has only 1 active partition.

 

[cgs007]

try this link..
http://support.wdc.com/download/

 

[Pariah]

It was my understanding that you can only have 1 active partition per computer regardless of drive count otherwise the master boot record does not know what volume to boot from. Even if you have multiple primary partitions containing multiple OS's, you can still only have one active partition which may be specially created by a boot manager which will allow you to choose which primary partition to boot from.