Partitions, volumes, logical drives, etc etc

For whatever reason I cannot wrap my head around partitions, volumes, logical drives, and all that. Having a hard time with this exam objective.

HELP!

Find more posts tagged with

SAVE $250 on Your CompTIA Boot Camp — Use Code "EXAM26"

Exclusively for TechExams members for Infosec Boot Camps starting before April 30, 2026

View CompTIA Boot Camps

Comments

stryder144

Maybe the concept of a hard drive as a building might help. So, let's consider the hard drive being a building. A partition would be the equivalent of walls creating separate spaces. You can only have four rooms (primary partitions) in the building (drive). If you need more rooms, you would take one of the rooms (partition) and sub-divide the space using cubicles (logical drives). Volumes are simply the space that has a single file system on it (NTFS, FAT, HFS+, EXT4, etc.) So, a single building with no rooms added would be a single volume. If I placed the four rooms (partitions), I could have four volumes. Each logical drive could also be a volume.

Hopefully, this helped you out a bit.

bloodshotbetty

That is great, thanks!

TheFORCE

Also a logical drive is something that is not does not reside physically inside the computer, no hardware drive. Instead it is created by taking space from a physical drive, partitioning the physical drive to two or th three logical volumes.

bloodshotbetty

But it functions as IF it were a physical drive, correct?

TheFORCE

bloodshotbetty wrote: »

But it functions as IF it were a physical drive, correct?

Yes, that is correct. You can test this yourself also, for example when you buy an HP or Dell PC. If you open the case you will see that there exists in many cases only 1 drive but if you look under your computer properties you see that there are 2 drives, C and D or whatever they have named them. Those drives can be said to exist logically.