formatting a new hard drive w/ 2 partitions

[Chau]

i jsut got a new 250 gb hard drive and i want to format it to 2 partitions of around 125 gb each.. this drive is only gonna be used for storage so no OS will be installed on it... what kind of partitions should they be? shoudl they both be primary? or one primary one extended?

thanks

 

[RussianSoldier]

I'm pretty sure fdisk (or whatever utility you use) won't let you make more than one primary partition. Place your operating system on the primary and format the other as extended dos or similar.

 

[Chau]

well im doing it right now in windows xp admin tools/disk management/storage and its letting me put both as primary? so i should do primary and extended even though im not gonna have an OS on this hd?

thanks

 

[EeyoreX]

It doesn't matter. The only practical thing to consider is that if there is more than one primary partition on any one system they will be assigned drive letters before any extended partitions/logical drives. And Windows will only let you create on primary partition per hard disk drive. You can create a primary and one extended if you want. Like I said, other than the one practical consideration I mentioned, it doesn't matter.

[EDIT]Also, keep in mind final usable space will be about 232GB. So you won't get two 125GB partitions. If you create your first partition as 125GB the remaining one will be about 108GB. See the chart here.

\Dan