Extended - Primary partition questions

[dgk]

While I read the sticky on partitioning, I only need to create NTFS partitions so I'd rather stick with the official tools. I think a disc is only allowed four partitions and I got a bit concerned reading that PART allows more if you reboot.

I have two 120 drives in Raid-0 so 240gb or so to play with. One partition is already created; 25gb for the system drive with XP-Pro installed and running. I'm not sure where to go from here. I figure programs and such go on the boot-system drive. Then a drive for the TEMP files and swap file. Maybe one for each? A big one for all the MPGs and WAV files. Lots of those. And maybe one more for MyDocuments to make backing up easier.

As I understand it, you are allowed four partitions, one of which can be an extended partition which can contain multiple logical drives. The others are primary partitions and can be bootable. I think the drives in the extended partition cannot be bootable. Well, through normal tools. Maybe various boot managers and such allow it.

So, which become primary partitions and which becomes the extended partition. Or, should I just create one extended partition and have everything but the boot-system be part of that? I guess I can spare some room for another primary partition just in case I decide to go to dual boot someday, but I don't see that happening. That's what the other computers hanging around here are for. Well, any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[itshondo]

though I don't use a raid setup, I did refer to this site for info, very usefull.

http://partition.radified.com/

 

[Tebore]

I don't know what the max number of partitions are. I'm sure you can have more than 4, I installed a 120 Gig 8meg drive for a friend and I formatted with 6 partitions. 3 for swap, windows install, and game install. The other 3 were for Music, videos/movies and room for DVD work. I'm pretty sure you can have more than 4.

 

[JigPu]

Well, I can't remember enough on partitioning to know for sure, but I believe you're only allowed one primary partition. The rest have to fit into the extended partition, but can still be bootable (I've got Linux on a partition in the extrended). You should be allowed any number of non-primary partitions.

JigPu

 

[dgk]

I think it was true once that you could only have one primary partition but that doesn't seem to be true any more. I have to check what Ghost can do. I'm pretty sure it can back up drives as well as paritions. Thanks for the pointer to the article. Oddly, he doesn't discuss what should be primary and what should be extended too much.

 

[Tebore]

Actually this post is making me wonder...
How do you install more than one OS on many Partitions? Would they be able to still be installed on extended Partitions and made to boot?

 

[dgk]

If I understand that question right, the OS is only one one drive in one partition. It can access the rest (as long as it understands the format).

I THINK that you have to boot from primary partitions and the one extended partition contains logical drives that don't boot. One thing is fairly certain though; drives that are in logical partitions do not undercut the drive letters of primary partitions. That is, if you have a second drive, have only one partition (extended) with logical drives in it. That way they don't displace other drives.

Hmm. An example. You have one drive with a primary partition that comes up as C:. It also has an extended partition with D: and E:. If you add another disc that has no primary partitions but only an extended partition (with one or more logical drives) C, D, and E remain as is and the new logical drives become F and G and so on. If that new disc contains a primary partition, that partition would become D, and D would become E and E become F. I guess any drives in an extended partition on the second drive would then come after the others. Who knows?