• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1606 0

never have to mess with manually adjusting your active partitions. Of course, because you’re crazy enough to want to get into PCs, that means within a year of reading this text you’re going to want to install other operating systems such as Linux on your PC (and that’s okay—all techs want to try this at some point). The moment you do, you’ll enter the world of boot manager programs of which the just-described System Commander is only one of many, many choices. You also might use tools to change the active partition manually—exactly when and how this is done varies tremendously for each situation and is way outside the scope of the CompTIA A+ exams, but make sure you know why you might need to set a partition as active.

When my System Commander boot screen comes up, it essentially asks me, “What primary partition do you want me to make active?”

Extended Partition

Understanding the purpose of extended partitions requires a brief look at the historical PC. The first versions of the old DOS operating system to support hard drives only supported primary partitions up to 32 MB. As hard drives went past 32 MB, Microsoft needed a way to support them. Instead of rewriting DOS to handle larger drives, Microsoft developers created the idea of the extended partition. That way, if you had a hard drive larger than 32 MB, you could make a 32-MB primary partition and the rest of the drive an extended partition. Over the years, DOS and then Windows were rewritten to support large hard drives, but the extended partition is still fully supported.

The beauty of an extended partition is in the way it handles drive letters. When you create a primary partition, it gets a drive letter and that’s it. But when you create an extended partition, it does not automatically get a drive letter. Instead, you go through a second step where you divide the extended partition into one or more logical drives. An extended partition may have as many logical drives as you wish. By default, Windows gives each logical drive in an extended partition a drive letter, and most Windows users use drive letters. However, if you’d like, you may even mount the drive letter as a folder on any lettered drive. You can set the size of each logical drive to any size you want. You’ll learn how to mount drives later in this chapter—for now, just get the idea that a partition may be mounted with a drive letter or as a folder.

* * *

EXAM TIP Primary partitions and logical drives on basic disks are also called basic volumes.

Extended partitions are completely optional; you do not have to create an extended partition on a hard drive. So, if you can’t boot to an extended partition and your hard drive doesn’t need an extended partition, why would you want to create one? First of all, the majority of systems do not use extended partitions. Most systems use only one hard drive, and that single drive is partitioned as one big primary partition—nothing wrong with that! Some users like having an extended partition with one or more logical drives, and they use the extended partitions as a way to separate data. For example, I might store all of my movie files on my G: logical drive.

Instead of assigning drive letters, you can mount logical drives as folders on an existing drive. It’s easy to make a logical drive and call it C:\STORAGE. If the C:\STORAGE folder fills up, you could add an extra hard drive, make the entire extra drive an extended partition with one logical drive, unmount the old C:\STORAGE drive, and then mount the new huge logical drive as C:\STORAGE. It’s as though you made your C: drive bigger without replacing it.

Dynamic Disks

With the introduction of Windows 2000, Microsoft defined an entirely new type of partitioning called dynamic storage partitioning, better known as dynamic disks. Dynamic disks drop the word partition and instead use the term volume. There is no dynamic disk equivalent to primary versus extended partitions. A volume is still technically a partition, but it can do things a regular partition cannot do, such as spanning. A spanned