If I split my Hard Drive in half does it matter if the second half is a primary or extended.

[XRdirtHead]

I wasn't sure what the difference might be other than I would be able to load a second operating system on the second partition if its a primary. I won't be but I was just wondering....
Thanks,
Ed

 

[Brian23]

The second half needs to be extended iirc. You can have 1 primary, and multiple extended partitions. In each extended partition, you can have up to 4 logical partitions.

 

[XRdirtHead]

thanks brian....

 

[Pariah]

A drive can only have 4 partitions on it, which are all known as primary partitions. In a Windows system, one will be a primary DOS partition which is designated active and is the boot partition. A second primary can assigned as a DOS extended partition. This second primary is not assigned a drive letter, and is unusable until you assign the space within it to logical partitions. If you have a one drive system, you are "limited" to 23 logical partitions and then you will run out of drive letters (C primary, D-Z logical), for multiple drive systems, you are limited to 24 total partitions. The 2 remaining primary partitions are typically unused, though they could be used for other non-DOS OS's. The difference between primary and logical parititions are that logical are not bootable, and the drive letters for the 2 are assigned differently. Also, there is no information about logical partitions in the master partition table, only the extended partition they reside in.

 

[XRdirtHead]

When I installed XP I only formatted the first half of the drive I'm using for XP. Then after loading XP I went into the area where I could see the part of the drive that wasn't formatted so I could format it and when it asked me if I wanted it to be primary or extended I wasn't sure what to make it. I'm guessing just make it extended then?

 

[Pariah]

Make it extended. You can create another 3 NTFS primary partitions, but there is no good reason to do so.

 

[XRdirtHead]

Thank you very much!