oops! sry no body in last post>can it be said that a logical drive is a virtual dive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Galen
  • Start date Start date
G

Galen

In D.T <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:
Hi.....I was wondering if it would be fair to say that a logical
drive is basicly a virtual drive?

TIA
Click to expand...

A Virtual Drive emulates your computer's CD/DVD-ROM drive, which enables you
to run CD and DVD programs, such as games, music CDs, and DVD videos
directly from your hard drive without the use of the physical CD/DVD-ROM
drive or the actual disc. VirtualDrive copies the CD or DVD image directly
to your hard drive.

A Logical Drive is an internal division of a large hard disk into smaller
units. One single physical drive may be organized into several logical
drives for convenience.

A virtual drive is on a drive though it may not be a logical drive ;) Make
any sense? No? Well... One, the logical drive, houses the other so that you
can do the above type things without the use of a DVD or CD. The logical
drive is much less OS dependant, if you format a disk you'll still
potentially have your partitions on that disk. If you format your disk
you'll kill the OS. So you'll still have your logical drives (unless, of
course, you deleted them.) However, a virtual drive is software driven in
most cases and is not going to be retained after a format because the drive
doesn't really exist, you're only fooling the OS into thinking it does. I
hope that makes sense. Perhaps someone can explain it better than I.

Galen
 
Hi, D.T.

As you may know, a physical hard disk drive can be divided into from 1 to 4
partitions. One of these may be an "extended partition"; the others are
"primary partitions". The extended partition may be further divided into
one or more "logical drives". The only limit on the number of logical
drives is physical disk size - and letters in the English alphabet (24 -
since A and B are reserved for floppy or other special drives).

Each primary partition can be assigned a "drive" letter. The extended
partition does not get a drive letter, but each logical drive within it
does. Each primary partition and each logical drive is a "volume" and can
be independently formatted. Volumes are often referred to as "drives", but
this gets confusing because of the ambiguity among physical drives, logical
drives, partitions, etc. "Drive letters" should be called "volume letters",
but it's too late to change that now, I'm afraid.

I'm not sure about a "virtual drive". My first thought was about "virtual
memory", also called a paging file or a swap file. But I think you mean
something else, as Galen described.

RC
 
Hi.....I was wondering if it would be fair to say that a logical drive is
basicly a virtual drive?

TIA
 
D.T said:
Hi.....I was wondering if it would be fair to say that a logical
drive is basicly a virtual drive?
Click to expand...

The terms have never been clearly defined so people have different
interpretations, but I would say the answer to that is a general "no". The
term "logical drive" usually refers to a logical volume within an extended
primary partition on a hard disk (i.e., an extended partition contains one
or more "logical drives").

The earliest usage I recall (back around DOS 3.0, I think) of the term
"virtual drive" was in reference to ramdisks (now more often called
ramdrives), where you setup a section of ram to appear to the system as
resembling a drive volume. Since a ramdrive does not actually exist as a
physical drive, it was "virtual".

Later, I've seem the term used to refer to drive letters allocated with the
subst command (e.g., "subst n: c:\myapps\myprog", the letter n: might be
referred to as a "virtual" drive). This isn't commonly used anymore, except
in the case of transferring the contents of a cdrom disk to the hard drive
and accessing it like a cdrom via its own drive letter.

I've also seen it used in reference to networks (e.g., "net use n:
\\servername\sharename", where n: might be called a virtual drive), although
it's more common now to refer to that as a "network drive" or a "mapped
drive".
 
Back
Top