Managing Data Storage

Wkelley1979

Guys

I need a little bit of help with the Different Drives and Partitions.

I dont really get the difference between Primary, extended and Logical.

Do you need a primary partition to then create a Logical Partition?? Whats the point in the Extended Partition if you cant assign Drive Letters?

I have the XP Self Paced Training Kit and am reading it, but it still doesnt make any sense. Any help would be welcome. Also What do you guys think on the Test-Out Practise Exams ???

Thanks

dynamik

A disk can only have four primary partitions. To get around this limitation, the extended partition was introduced. A disk can have only extended partition. Now your maximums are either four primary partitions or three primary partitions and an extended partition. Think of the extended partition as a container for the logical partitions. It doesn't have a file system of it's own, so you can't assign a drive letter to it. However, you can create logical partitions inside of it. Logical partitions are essentially primary partitions which are created instead of an extended partition. You can assign a drive letter to these logical partitions and use them in exactly the same way as primary partitions. Now, you have overcome the four partition limit of a disk.

You can get more detailed information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning