Primary Partitions

[munruss]

Just did an install of win 2K pro and i know that i am able to create up to 4 primary partitions.
is it to my understanding that primary partitions are for installing multiple O/S's?

 

[pocketdemon]

munruss:

Primary partions on a harddrive don't have to be used to install other operating systems. True, that if you do want another OS installed, you will need to install it on a primary partion because otherwise it won't be understood correctly by boot managers (NT Loader, LILO), but there are other uses for primary partions as well.

I have two partions on a harddrive, which are both primary. One has Win2k on it, the other is used as data storage. I also heard that if you are only going to have two partions, making them both primary is the best way to go, but if you were to want more partions, you should assign a chunk of space to an extended partion and split it up into a few logicals.

I am not certain about this though, this is what I have come accross word-of-mouth wise. If I'm talking out of my ass, please correct me.

But you say that you can create up to 4 primaries. How's that? What software/tool are you using to create them?

 

[Nevo]

The MBR of a disk contains the partition table.

There's space there for defining up to 4 partitions. So yes, you can have up to 4 primary partitions, or 4 primary and 1 extended partition. The extended partition can hold many logical volumes.

Win9x only recognizes the first primary partition, the rest must be on an extended partition.

NT/W2K/WinXP recognize multiple primary partitions.

Primary partitions are somewhat 'safer' than extended partitions because the MBR is somewhat protected from changes. Extended partitions have an additional partition table located deeper in to the disk. The problem is that these additional partition tables are chained together with pointed from the MBR to the first, to the second, etc. If any of these pointers becomes damaged, you lose the logical volumes.

This doesn't happen frequently, but it can happen. Manually walking the partition tables to repair them can be troublesome.