Hi, I have a basic grasp of the difference between primary partitions, logical drives etc, but is on better than the other in terms of separating data in the event of needing to re-install. The reason I am asking is that I have recently re-installed on my XP machine. Drive D was a logical drive, not a primary partition, but the re-install still allowed this to be recognized and my data is intact. Something intuitively tells me I should make it a primary partition, but does it really make a difference? Thanks, John

Windows XP (and I assume Vista too) supports up to four Primary partitions, so if you want four separate drives in a single hard disk, they can all be Primary.

If you want more than four partitions, you can still have three Primary but then need to create an Extended Partition in which you create Logical Drives. It is probably tidier to have a single Primary partition and create the remaining drives as Logical within an Extended partition. In terms of the way the drives behave, it shouldn't make any difference whether Primary or Logical.

...not sure if that's telling you anything you don't already know? :wink:

Thanks Mike. Somehow I had reckoned (wrongly as I am beginning to appreciate) that a logical partition would not be maintained when it came to re-installing the os. If I am only concerned about having a partition to keep data safe etc in the event of needing to re-install, then it doesn't matter what type, and as you say a Logical Partition will be ok and behave exactly the same as a Primary? Thanks again, John