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Partitioning Drive: Primary VS. Extended partitions.

M

Martin

Lifer
I was wondering what the difference is excatly.

Should I make 1 primary partition and 1 extended with 2 logical drives, or simply make 3 primary partitions?



PS. I want 3 partitions since I can have 1 for OS+apps, 1 for files and 1 for linux if I ever decide to get it again.
 
1 primary + 2 logical for now.

When you decide to go dual boot, get PartitionMagic.

It will incomplicate the whole procedure. It includes a boot manager.
 
Why use extended partitions if you don't have to? Just use 3 primaries. There are also a couple technical problems you might run into using logical partitions. One I'm sure of is that, if you use Linux, you can't install LILO to the partition boot record of a non-primary partition and have it boot first by flagging the partition as bootable. Also, WinXP, maybe 2k as well, seems protective of what happens inside of its extended partiition. Though I'm not certain, I'm pretty sure that the one time I really bollixed up my system was by using linux cfdisk to make logicals within an extended partition originally created by XP. On the next boot, I came up with a corrupted hal.dll and, after many hours, only managed to fix things enough to save my data before wiping everything.

 
Extended partitions were devoloped to get around the DOS/FAT 4 primary partition limit. This means 3 primary and one extended which can have many logicial partitions inside. If all you will ever need is 3 partitions then making them all primary would be ok. A good scenerio for an extended partition with one logicial inside is when adding a drive to a single drive, two partition system - C:, D: The second extended/logicial drive would get the E: letter instead of hijacking D: if it were added as a primary. Changing your origional D: to E: would obliviously screw up your shortcuts/program access.
Remember also that most "boot loaders" run from a small primary partition so save one of the four for that.
 
When you decide to go dual boot you don't need partition magic.
Go ahead and do it anyway you want 1 Primary, 1 extended with 2 logicals, etc... just leave one partition reserved for Linux.
When it comes time to install Linux the first thing your going to do is delete the partition anyhow.
 
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