Logical Drives and Extended Partitions (2024)

FAQs

Logical Drives and Extended Partitions? ›

A logical partition can be formatted and assigned a drive letter. A logical partition must be created inside an extended partition. If an extended partition does not already exist on the disk or the specified size of the logical drive exceeds the extended partition, no partition is created.

An Extended partition is a special type of partition that contains "Free Space" in which more than the four Primary partitions can be created. Partitions created within the Extended partition are called Logical partitions, and any number of Logical partitions can be created within an Extended partition.

A logical partition is the hard disk partition created on an extended partition. Like primary partition, a logical partition can be used to install Windows and any other types of files, but you cannot set it to active and a logical partition can contain other partitions.

If using Windows in MBR mode then you will have BIOS/MBR. The rules on partitions is that you can only have 4 primary partitions. Or one primary can be the extended and then an unlimited number of logical inside the extended.

If we see the last partition size which is extended partition then they use 16 bytes of space. It means if we divide the 1048576 bytes to 16 we get a total number of logical partition under extended partition i.e. 1048576/16=65536(Maximum Logical Partition). We can use maximum 65536 total logical partitions under it.

An extended partition is a partition that can be divided into additional logical drives. Unlike a primary partition, you don't need to assign it a drive letter and install a file system. Instead, you can use the operating system to create an additional number of logical drives within the extended partition.

An Extended Partition Allows More Drives An extended partition allows for more than four drives on the same physical disk.

Maintaining independent servers. Dedicating a portion of the resources (disk storage unit, processors, memory, and I/O devices) to a logical partition achieves logical isolation of software. If configured correctly, logical partitions also have some hardware fault tolerance.

Logical drives provide a way to organize and manage the storage space on a physical drive.

An allocated part of a physical disk drive that is designated and managed as an independent unit. For example, drives C:, D: and E: on a Windows PC can represent three physical drives or one physical drive partitioned into three logical drives. Contrast with physical drive.

When can extended partitions be used? ›

The extended partition is a partition that is not bootable. We can use it to boot the operating system, establish one to four primary partitions and install multiple operating systems without interfering.

Logical partitions are similar to primary partitions. However, while only four primary partitions can exist on a single disk, the number of logical partitions that can exist on a disk is unlimited. A logical partition can be formatted and assigned a drive letter.

A logical partition consists of a set of items that have the same partition key. For example, in a container that contains data about food nutrition, all items contain a foodGroup property. You can use foodGroup as the partition key for the container.

You can add more space to existing primary partitions and logical drives by extending them into adjacent, contiguous unallocated space on the same disk. To extend a basic volume, format it with the NTFS file system. You can extend a logical drive within contiguous free space in the extended partition that contains it.

Master Boot Record (MBR) disks use the standard BIOS partition table. GUID partition table (GPT) disks use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). One advantage of GPT disks is that you can have more than four partitions on each disk. GPT is also required for disks larger than 2 terabytes (TB).

Physical disks are automatically defined by Windows to represent the entire disk, and must never be defined by the user. Logical partitions must be defined by the user to represent a specific partition in a disk. These partitions must be logical partitions or drives contained in an extended partition.

There is no better choice between logical and primary partition because you must create one primary partition on your disk. Otherwise, you will not be able to boot your computer. 1. There is no difference between the two kinds of partitions in the ability to store data.