Extended Partition explanation?

[MIDIman]

What is an extended partition exactly?

I reformatted a drive last night and installed WinXP SP2. I deleted my previous C-partition (of two partitions, both were Primary Partitions) and recreated a new one with the XP setup.

Now, in Windows Disk Management, its showing my C-Drive as a Logical Drive within a Primary Partition, and the D-Drive is still a Primary Partition. Why did Windows setup do this, and should I change it back to a Primary (if I can - I have Partition Magic if it'll do it).

 

[Markbnj]

Without going into tons of technical detail (because I can't), a primary partition can contain only one logical drive, and can be the active partition that the system boots from. Typically your active primary partition is C:\ on a Windows XP machine. An extended partition can contain multiple logical drives, so if you wanted to have D:\, E:\, and F:\ on what is your current D:\ drive, then you would need to partition it as an extended partition. Other than that I don't think there are any consequences of it being partitioned as primary.