Can I boot from a logical partition?

[Stoneburner]

Some sources i've found say that you need a primary partition to boot an OS others say ther eis no functional difference between logical or primary. I have my OS on an old WD 200 gig and I want to reinstall it onto a new drive.

Also, I once read that you can create a partition on the edge of a hard drive which is where read/write functions are faster. Can partition magic do this? IS this even doable and if so worthwhile? thanks in advance. Ill wait for responses before I screw up something badly.

 

[PowerEngineer]

The answer to your question on primary partitions depends on your OS. Assuming Windows XP, you can read this; the gist is that at least some files need to be in a primary partition. If you're moving XP to a new hard drive, then I can't think of a good reason for not moving it into the primary partition.

I don't use Linux, but have been told that it can be installed in any partition.

Good luck!

 

[Nothinman]

Some sources i've found say that you need a primary partition to boot an OS others say ther eis no functional difference between logical or primary. I have my OS on an old WD 200 gig and I want to reinstall it onto a new drive.

There is a difference in how logical and primary partitions are described on the drive, if there wasn't there wouldn't be any need to give them different names. With Windows I think you need at least ntldr, boot.ini and a few other files on a primary partition for it to boot but the system drive can be logical if you really want it to be. Personally I use as few partitions as possible to keep things simple so I see no reason to use logical partitions any more, let alone put the OS on there.

Also, I once read that you can create a partition on the edge of a hard drive which is where read/write functions are faster.

Don't worry about this, the speed difference will be minimal and the only place you'll notice is in synthetic benchmarks.

I don't use Linux, but have been told that it can be installed in any partition.

Yea, GRUB or LILO should be able to boot from any partition that the BIOS can read.

 

[Bozo Galora]

We just had this situation from a poster in GH forum
He used the XP setup routine to delete partitions and create 2 new ones (C and D) and format.
Then he instructed XP setup to install on "C". After completion, everything worked fine.
But when he looked in disk manager, XP files were on C, but bootloader files were on D. (ntdetect ntldr and boot.ini)
Somehow he mistakenly made C a logical and D the primary, so XP automatically put bootloading files on D root.
Counterintuitively (liguistically), disk manager shows D as the primary/system drive and C/logical as the boot drive.

So the lesson here is that XP will install itself as best it can.
😛

 

[Stoneburner]

thanks for the help. I just installed on the first partition. Partition magic says that a primary partition is not bootable if it is past the 1023 cylinder limit so I figured why risk it.

 

[Nothinman]

Partition magic says that a primary partition is not bootable if it is past the 1023 cylinder limit so I figured why risk it.

You probably have an old BIOS or old copy of PQMagic for it to say that.