Drive Partition help

If you want to use the Whole Hard Drive you just give it one Partition.

And this is the Primary Partition but is this what they call a Lagicale Drive?

Because I know one Drive can have up to four Primary Partitions.
And every Partition will have it's own Drive Latter.

So am I right that when you make more Partitions they are called Lagical Drives??

 

You have one primary partition, then logical drives(partitions)
I can tell you that on mine, I have multiple partitions and operating systems.
If you dual, or, triple boot, the first operating system will be the bootable and primary partition, until you add another operating system, or, a second instalation of the original operating system.When you boot into the second operating system, it should show as the boot, and logical drive. Ditto, if you have more.
If you have partitions for data , they will show as logical drives.
A little anomoly I noticed is that if using windows 7, and you use a usb stick as readyboost (extra ram) then on mine it shows as primary, while the partition I am using shows as logical, as I have a very experimental system for my own 'play' time.
Further confusion if having multiple operating systems is that Vista, and Windows 7 like to call themselves the C: drive,-
So, back to your question
Under normal circumstances, unless you want to get really into the geek stuff,
First partition is the Primary Partition =(Usually C: )
Any other partitions are logical, and will have their own Drive letter (NOTE THE BIT ABOUT VISTA AND WINDOWS 7)
XP, AND VISTA will be called earlier versions of Windows, if installing Windows 7.
Further you should install the earlier versions of windows in the respective order if you install VISTA, or, WINDOWS 7, as well.
I hope I have not confused you.

 

This is what I ment.

A Drive can have up to 4. Primary Patitions.

What I meen is is all 4. Partitions going to show up as Drive Latters
C: D: E: F:

 

Your C: Partition will be the primary partion, if you create more partitions, they will show as logical partitions if you are in C:,and if you have dvd/cd drives, these will show as a Drive letter too.
So,if you have 4 partitions created before you put your operating system in C; (USING PARTITION SOFTWARE) then these other partitions will show up as D:, E:, and F:-
If you just put one operating system on C: then create more Partitions, and you have one dvd/cd drive- the dvd/cd drive will show up as D:, and the other Partitions will show up as E:,F:,and G:> If you have one operating system on C;, and have TWO DVD/CD DRIVES, then the dvd/cd drives will be D:, and E:, and the other Partitions will then show as F:, G:, and H:.If you insert a seperate usb stick this will show as a higher letter, depending on your setup . If you have card slots, these will have a drive letter too.
If you decide to have dual booting, and you install another operating system on any other partition, then those drive ltters may change, as Windows 7 , for instance, wants to call itself the C: partion, even if it is actually on -say- the F: partition, and if you have two instances of Windows 7, it can be a bit confusing, but is quite easy to get used to- the more you geek, you can learn to control where it thinks it is. Whichever partition you are running from, becomes the primary, whilst that operating system is running. With the correct software you can actually have many more than 4 Partitons, as I have.
Good luck.

 

I bleieve that logical drives are somewhat obelete as a concept and that they originate from Windows 98 and earlier. If you have one drive you can create multiple partitions. The partition with your OS on is your primary partition. On XP and later you have one logical drive per partition. If memory serves me correctly, I think on 98 and earlier you could create multiple logical drives on the one partition and thus they would appear as multiple drives in windows but they were on the same partition. Nowadays it is one logical drive per partition and the boot drive is the primary... I may have all that completely wrong as it is a long time since I used Win 98.

 

Thanks I do understand that it will always re arange the Latters.
So every Partition but the C: is called a Lacical Drive?

And one thing about FAT types?
Nomatter what size hard drive you use or what FAT you use 32 or 16 amd I right that it will always devid the Disk into even aumont of Sectors and then you pick the FAT you want and that makes the Clusters?

 

Tbh i have never looked into sectors that much. i think sectors and clusters are just the pcs way of adressing the disk area. Nlwadays ntfs is the most common file system. fat16 is old tecbnology from win 98 and earlier. fat32 is newer and can still be used but windows will limit your partition size under fat32

 

Fat32- usred I believe up to XP , and FROM THEN, USED MOSTLY FOR THINGS LIKE USB STICKS, AND SAVING DATA ON- Fta 32 explained here.
http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?mode=r&qid=174814&query=fat+32&spid=global&catalog=LCID%3D2057&ast=25&ast=28&ast=30&ast=31&res=10

 

Hard drive sectors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector
A cluster is the smallest unit of disk space that can be allocated to a file, which is why clusters are often called allocation units

 

I do need help understanding this?

I read a Drive can have up to 4. Primary Partitions and only one of the Primary Partitions can be Booted from.

And every Primary Partition will show up as a Drive Latter.
And Primary Partitions are not called Lagicle Drives.

But if I take a Primary Partition and Partition it again this new Partition is called a Lagicle Drive why?

Why is the Primary Partitions not called Lagicle Drives they show up a Drive Latters just as the Extanded Partitions do??

 

Think of your hard disk like a filing cabinet. You have one hard disk (the file cabinet) The cabinet can have several draws (partitions) which can be divided into multiple sections (logical drives) and each section contains all your folders and files.

Have a read through this. It has some useful information.

There are two types of partitions. Primary and extended. Extended are now pretty much obselete. In general you have one logical drive residing in each partition (Extended partitions can hold multiple logical drives).

Windows will allocate a drive letter to ever logical drive that it finds.

So... Example

You could have one hard disk with one primary partition containing one logical drive and one extended partition with two logical drives. When you boot to Windows you would see three "drives" C: D: and E:

 

That Wikopedia link explains it pretty well-look here, too
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-vista/What-are-partitions-and-logical-drives
a primary partition can be set as bootable (active) while a logical cannot.
FAT16 -- -max size on disc 2,048 MB the largest that FAT16 can support with 65,526 clusters in it,
FAT32 = max size was 2tb, but I am not sure beyond that--Number of FAT Entries 524,208

but basically you do not need to worry too much about it- I honestly don't. I use HyperOs to set my partitions, and can have as many as I like- other software -partition magic, and even Windows 7 can strink a hard drives single partition , and make more partitions.

 

Agreed.... Dont worry about it.

 

I'm just going to drop this link which is fairly good. It is describing a rather old system where you would only have two partitions on a smaller drive like 20gb or something.

But the take away is that a HD can have up to 4 actual partitions. You can have less but 4 is maximum. Any that are Primary are potentially bootable although there can only be one partition set as Active/Boot at a time.

Each primary partition is automatically assigned a drive letter. If you want more then 4 drives then you have to give up one of the primary partitions and create an extended partition instead. The extended partition is not assigned a drive letter. Only after you create logical partitions/drives within it are these logical drives assigned letters. You can have only one extended partition per HD. But the extended partition can contain up to 20 logical partitions/drives. I think the meaning of "logical" drives is just to differentiate them from true primary partitions. They are part of a partition not really their own partition.

Take a look at this picture. Partition 1, 2 and 3 are primary partitions, are formatted to NTFS and receive drive letters. #4 is an extended partition which starts at 16094 and ends at 56094, it is not formatted but is just a container for the remaining "logical" partitions and does not receive a drive letter. Now 5,6 and 7 are really part of the extended partition #4, are formatted to NTFS and thus get a drive letter. Their start and end numbers are all part of the same 16094-56094 range which is the extended partition #4.

I have to say that it really is rather confusing when trying to explain it. But in reality if you want more than 4 partitions on a HD, you just create 3 primary partitions of the sizes you want then create an extended partition of the remaining space. Once the extended partition is created you can create smaller logical drives/partitions in that extended partition.

 

Well let me go One step at a time.

When you buy a Hard Drive it has been Low Level Formatted. It has had the Tracks put down and they Divided the Tracks into Sectors.

And I know todays Hard Drives can have 17 to 900 Sectors per Track.

Am I right on this so far?

Next when you get the Hard Drive you have to just make your Partitions and then High Level Format the Partitions you made.

Do I have this right?

And when you do a High Level Format you just put the FAT you want to use down and the OS makes to copies of the MBR.

Do I have this right?