XP Drive Management
• Windows XP supports up to four partitions per hard disk.
• Windows XP supports two main partition TYPES: Primary and Extended.
• Windows XP supports three file systems NTFS, FAT32 and FAT [the latter 2
being introduced with earlier Windows systems].
• A primary partition is one from which one can boot up an Operating System.
• All four partitions can be designated as Primary [or bootable, should one
wish to install more than one Operating System, such as XP, 98, Linux etc].
• One primary partition at a time must be marked as ‘Active’ designating it
as the one from which the computer will boot: in almost all cases this should
be the ‘C-Drive’.
• One partition can be allocated as an Extended Partition. These differ in
that they are not formatted with a file system or assigned a specific drive
letter [‘D’, thru to ‘Z’].
• An Extended Partition is then a dedicated area of disk space in which one
can then create a number of Logical Drives.
• Logical Drives are similar to primary partitions in that they are
individually formatted with a file system and assigned a drive letter: thus
an extended partition can have an unlimited number of Logical Drives each
with its own drive letter, none of the Logical drives is bootable.
• Use for logical drives can be to assign a specific drive letter [logical
drive] for each file type [word document, email, MP3] or on a computer with
many users, one or more logical drive per user.
• Of the file systems, NTFS is the most versatile and the newest, with a 32
bit address structure which gives it the ability to access the very large
disk drives available now [200Gb drives generally available] and in the
future.
• Limitations for each file system are:
o FAT – only addresses up to 4Gb of disk space [Windows XP, 95 and earlier
Windows versions only]
o FAT32 - only addresses up to 32Gb of disk space [Windows XP, Me 98 and 95
Second Edition]
o NTFS - addresses up to 2,000Gb of disk space [Windows XP]
• One would use a partitioned hard drive formatted as FAT32 or FAT should
one wish to accommodate a dual boot system [running XP or an earlier
Operating System].
• Should one have Windows XP Pro, a further benefit of NTFS is that files
can be encrypted.
