please explain in clear ways and with examples the difference in logical drives, and partitions?

Question

use examples with XP, and most likeable with 2 hard drives, or whatever would make it real easy to understand.
i know logical drives are contained in extended partitions, and we have primary partitions, but hw do we work with them in real life.

Answer 1

Interesting postulation, I will try to help. In basic terms, a "partition" is just an allocated amount of space on a hard disk. The size of the partition can range anywhere from one sector, to the entire size of the drive. Most Hard drives have a single partition with the full amount of the hard drives sectors allocated to the partition, however, you can place as many partitions on your HDD as you want (relatively speaking of course).....
Think of it this way, you go out to your favorite computer parts warehouse and buy a 300 Gigabit Hard Drive, you bring it home, slap it in ole sparky (Assuming you want to just Add more hard drive space to your existing Windows XP box, seeing you wanted it explained in that reference) and if you hooked it up and set it up correctly, you can now choose how you want to "Partition" and allocate the Space on the new Hard Drive.

Easiest way would be to go into your Control Panel, Administrative tools, Computer Management link and then click on "Disk Management" in the Computer Management consoles list. Once there you should see the new 300 GB hard drive with no partitions, and no drives associated. When you right mouse click it you can create a new partition and set the new partition size for either the entire size (300 gig's) or choose a lesser value if you want to have multiple separated partitions that you can later format and assign drive letters to

(Think 1 partition of 300 GB or 2 partitions of 150 GB each or 4 partitions of 75 GB each the "partition(s) once made are seen by the operating system as separate entities for all logical purposes)

Once you decide how you want to separate, or not separate the space, you partition, allocate space, format, and assign a drive letter(s). Say you just want to add space that you will basically just dump all your growing "Stuff" into, you could keep a single partition formatted for maximum storage and assign it the drive letter, perhaps drive "M" if you are a music buff, and just create different folders if you want to organize things.

If however you are trying to run a very basic server, and you are using (Insert your favorite file sharing program here),but you want increased security by say having your shares folder somewhere other than the same drive you might have last summer’s racy pictures on (Insert understanding nod ) you can say take that 300GB drive, and partition it for 3 100GB drives (Keep "M" for music, now at 100 Gig size, which for all purposes is a nice start for a collection, but have say drive "P" for those things you may want to keep personal (That adds up quickly) and now perhaps an "X" drive, now, get your mind out of the gutter, X is of course for all those backed up (wink wink) X-Box games that you made copies of after legally purchasing them so you don’t have to worry about wearing out the original in the first month of use).
Now, for clarity's sake I will interject that this is but ONE way, and a very basic one at that, with which you can use a hard drive, for levities sake I won’t go into spanning, different types of volumes, or raid, you just asked about logical drives and basic partitions I am assuming.

Now the partition (s) you created at the desired size is/are formatted and assigned a drive letter, as previously discussed, in the process of doing so, you are creating a "Logical" drive, that whole distinct and "separate" entities I mentioned. In computer "logical" terms a "Logical Drive" is nothing more than a unique grouping of allocated space with which it can use as you tell it to, obedient little sparky huh.

I know, it reads like war and peace, I tried being gentle, hope it helps