Basic Primary Partition,Extended Partition and Logical Partition

Primary Partition, Logical Partition and Extended Partition (Disk Partition Basic)

A disk partition is a defined storage space on a hard drive. All Windows operating systems can let users divide a hard disk into multiple partitions, in this way, making one physical hard disk into several smaller logical partitions. To store classified data, multiple partitions on a disk can organize his data more effectively. On Microsoft Windows system, the OS was installed in one partition and other some partition is created to store user data, documents or games. This benefit is when a problem occurs with Windows system; the OS partition can be totally destroyed and reinstalled, but this does not affect the data partition.

Some users may split a hard disk into multiple partitions because smaller partitions offer smaller cluster sizes. A cluster size is the smallest chunk of data which a partition can store. A large partition might have a cluster size of 64KB. This means that a file with one word in it will occupy 64KB of space on the disk. In a smaller partition, that file might only require 2KB to store. This is a useful policy if you need to save a large number of small files.

You can create, delete and format partition through using the diskpart.exe command. Many operating systems also have graphical tools which accomplish the same task such as Partition Assistant. The Partition Assistant is a free partition manager. It not only can partition on a disk, but also resize/move a partition to adjust the size of the partition to optimize disk space usage.

The following is Disk Partition Related Glossary

Primary Partition and Active Partition:

A primary partition is in which an Operating System can be installed. One hard disk may contain a maximum of 4 primary partitions. An active partition is based on primary partition. Any one of the 4 primary partitions can be set as active partition. Since there can be 4 primary partitions with 4 different Operating Systems installed, one of the partition that is marked active is used for the initial booting. The active partition contains the boot loader (such as ntldr or bootmgr) to load operating systems from a disk.

Extended Partition and Logical Partition:

Because the primary only can be created four maximum, this need to use extended partition to break the limitation of 4 partitions. In an Extended Partition you can create unlimited logical partition. You can store data in the logical partitions similar with primary partition, but the extended partition is not used to store data, because the Extended Partition is used to hold logical partitions, at the same time, there is one extended partition on a disk.

Partition Table:

Partition Table is a storage space which records some information about primary, extended and logical partitions. Further, the create/delete/resize of any partition all will modify the partition table to reflect the changes permanently. If partition table is crashed by virus or other stuffs, you partition will lost, so the table is extremely important.