Hard drives. Primary, Extended and an USB Docking station

[taltos1]

After reading a bunch about Primary vs Extended and Logical drives I understand the general gist of how the work. Now, I am in the process of building a new computer and consolidating my frankenstein of a computer (5+ IDE hard drives) into a 1TB sata Hard drive.

I checked my old drives in XP pro's "Disk Management" and saw that some of my drives have a light blue bar, some have a dark blue bar, and some have a green border around the drives.

1. What do they all mean? I assume 1 color is ext. and the other is primary?

2. I use Disk Management to partition new drives, what should I create for my data (music, files, etc) Primary or Extended? I am still fuzzy here...

3. I also have a USB Hard drive dock that you can connect a IDE hard drive to, can I simply plug in the hard drive and plug it in to the new computer and it will show up as an external drive? Do the three color mentioned above give some idea of how well this process will work?

Thanks a lot.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

I wouldn't use too many partitions, that's what folders and Linux are for. I'm not sure what the colors are for but you should be able to pop any of those IDE drives in and it will show up as an external drive.

 

[taltos1]

I plan on having 2 drives. C: will be 300GB and have windows, D: will be 1TB and have all my files, but what should D: be formatted as?..