Prev: Won't boot from CD with USB keyboard XP
Next: No Internet connection on a laptop
From: Metspitzer on 13 Jan 2010 12:43
On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:39:39 -0800 (PST), Flasherly
<Flasherly(a)live.com> wrote:

>On Jan 13, 1:54 am, Metspitzer <kilow...(a)charter.net> wrote:
>>
>> I plan to use the drive for data only. I have a poor understanding of
>> what a partition and a logical drive is.
>
>A disc can have 4 primary partitions.
>
>Each of the partitions can be assigned logical drives, up to the
>letters in the alphabet (26).
>
>That's the job of partitioning software.
>
>The job of "arbitrating" partitions - becomes one of the OS. In a
>sense...
>
>A dedicated 3-rd party manager will also do the arbitrating, and
>sometimes quite a bit more.
>
>The definition of doing the job of arbitration is very simple --
>without it, you don't boot.


I will go with what I have.
Thanks everyone
From: John on 15 Jan 2010 09:48
On Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:15:15 -0500, Metspitzer <kilowatt(a)charter.net>
wrote:

>I thought the primary partition was the partition you put the OS on. I
>am almost sure I created a primary and two secondary partitions on
>drive 0. That was a long time ago.
>
>I am trying to format drive 1. I made a primary partition of 175G and
>was going to make 3 175G secondary partitions. I made the second
>partition secondary and formatted it at 175G. Now I am working on the
>next. The only option I get is to format it primary. I am not sure
>this makes any difference, but I wondered why I can't make partitions
>2-4 all secondary partitions?
>
>Here is a screen shot of my drives. XP
>http://i48.tinypic.com/x3c006.jpg


Any one hard drive is indeed limited to a maximum of four primary
partitions. However only *one* of the four primary partitions can
contain logical partitions.

To add a bit to what others have said, only the initial boot strap files
need to be located on a primary partition. This partition *must be set
as active and contain an MBR*. For NT OSes from NT4 up to and including
XP there are three boot files: 'boot.ini', 'ntldr' and 'NTDETECT.COM'.
NT4 server required a 4th file whose name escapes me at the moment.

The OS itself, usually called the 'Windows' folder (but it may have a
different name) can be located in a primary or logical partition. This
applies to all NT based MS OSes from NT4.0 up to and including XP. You
can find this folder easily enough because it will contain two
sub-folders called 'system' and 'system32' among many others.

To confuse you even more our friends at MS have chosen to call
partitions 'drives', directories 'folders', and to label the initial
boot strap partition as the 'system partition'. They also got it
backwards when they decided to call the partition containing the actual
OS a 'boot partition'. So ...

Prior Convention vs. MS Speak
-------------------------- -----------------

partition = drive
directory = folder
boot strap = system
OS = boot

Your computer's BIOS looks for the MBR (master boot record) located on
an *active primary* partition. The MBR tells the BIOS where to find the
boot files, not by name but by actual physical location on the disk. You
may have any number of operating systems on your computer but all must
start out in this place.

Vista and W7:

I have no experience with these two so I can't say for certain but I
would suspect that they are similar with possibly different file names.

Hopefully this will help the OP,

John


From: MF on 15 Jan 2010 12:23
"Metspitzer" <kilowatt(a)charter.net> wrote in message news:4a7qk593v39vdjhh46ljlf5j5klhbt44gt(a)4ax.com...
>I thought the primary partition was the partition you put the OS on. I
> am almost sure I created a primary and two secondary partitions on
> drive 0. That was a long time ago.
>
> I am trying to format drive 1. I made a primary partition of 175G and
> was going to make 3 175G secondary partitions. I made the second
> partition secondary and formatted it at 175G. Now I am working on the
> next. The only option I get is to format it primary. I am not sure
> this makes any difference, but I wondered why I can't make partitions
> 2-4 all secondary partitions?
>
> Here is a screen shot of my drives. XP
> http://i48.tinypic.com/x3c006.jpg

To do what you describe: Make the primary partition, 175 gigs. Then make an ***Extended Partition*** that takes up the rest of the drive. Then, within the extended partition, make as many ***Logical Drives*** as you want, of whatever size you want.

Given your situation, you can - if you want - simply make 4 primary drives. To boot from a partition, primary versus logical drive is not the crucial designation. To boot, the operating system that is booting must think the partition it is on is the ***Active Partition ***.

For example, on an old XP machine, I have one primary partition and six logical drives. The six logical drives are contained in one extended partition. The primary partition boots Win 98 (or used to - it broke, I deleted it) so now it's function is to contain the files that are necessary for NT based windows systems, up to Server 2003 R2, to boot.

The logical drives contain: Windows XP (on D:, running now) Win 2000 on E:, Win 2000 Server on F:, and Win Server 2003 on G:. There are also two Data partitions on logical drives H: and I:. ALL of those OSs will boot from their logical drives BECAUSE the necessary boot files that they all use (ntdetect, ntldr, boot.ini, and bootsect.dos for Win98) are located on C:, which is a primary partition that is marked active.

This is something of a mess and just fell out that way as I learned the OSs; it wasn't planned. But even though it's a mess, it all works smoothly, illustrating the great boot flexibility of NT based systems ---- when used with each other and when you use the boot files of the latest version.

However, do bear in mind that multiple partitions on the same physical drive do not guard you against any physical problems with the drive. They are not a backup solution. What they do guard against somewhat is corruption in what Microsoft calls the partition sector, which contains the partition table. You will have one Master Boot Record on the active partition, and multiple partition tables, so if one partition table gets corrupted, or that area, and only that area, of the disk goes bad, you will only lose access to the data in that particular partition or logical drive. However, this is an unlikely scenario, and so only a very tiny bit of protection.

So, in a nutshell, you can use 4 primary partitions, or 1 primary partition and 1 extended partition with 3 (or less - or more) logical drives. All of this can be done with XP's disk manager, which does, in fact, work. What the disk manager doesn't do is allow you to re-arrange things later without destroying data.
First  |  Prev  | 
Pages: 1 2 3
Prev: Won't boot from CD with USB keyboard XP
Next: No Internet connection on a laptop