what is the difference between primary and logical drives?

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dark_archon06

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Jul 27, 2013
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I've always seen windows installed on a primary partition along with other primary and logical partitions.
but what's the difference between them?
I know that they have different boot sectors-mbr and vbr and there can be only 4 primary partitions where 64 of logical partitions can be.
my question is what is the MAIN DIFFERENCE between them? and are any above information wrong?
 
Solution
Ijack
The original design of MBR partitioning only had space for 4 partitions. These are Primary partitions. As this became a limitation the design was changed to allow what are called Extended partitions; one, or more, of the Primary partitions can be designated as Extended partitions.

You cannot create a file system in an Extended partition, but you can define Logical partitions (Volumes, call them what you will) inside an Extended partition. To all intents and purposes these Logical partitions can be used in the same way as the original Primary partions. However, the one important difference is that Windows cannot boot from a Logical partition; the boot files have to be installed on a Primary partition. (This is not the case for other...
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Ijack

Ijack

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Jul 30, 2008
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The original design of MBR partitioning only had space for 4 partitions. These are Primary partitions. As this became a limitation the design was changed to allow what are called Extended partitions; one, or more, of the Primary partitions can be designated as Extended partitions.

You cannot create a file system in an Extended partition, but you can define Logical partitions (Volumes, call them what you will) inside an Extended partition. To all intents and purposes these Logical partitions can be used in the same way as the original Primary partions. However, the one important difference is that Windows cannot boot from a Logical partition; the boot files have to be installed on a Primary partition. (This is not the case for other operating systems, such as Linux.)

With that one proviso, you can treat Logical partitions and Primary partitions in much the same way. But you can have a lot more Logical partitions than Primary partitions. And it's important to remember that you can only have 4 partitions on an MBR partitioned disk. Nowadays the answer is to use GPT partitioned disks, which don't have this limitation (but, again, there are restrictions on booting Windows from a GPT disk).
 
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