I have three hard disks with two partitions in one of them.
I use WinXP Pro only.
I want to know what are advantages or disadvantages in terms of performance of Windows if I format a particular partition as "primary" as opposed to "logical"
 
Let me explain my question through two screenshots with two different cases (which are marked with RED boundaries). This is about the particular partition H:. In Case 1 H: is formatted as Primary and in Case 2 H: is formatted as Logical.

Case 1 (H: is Primary)



Case 2 (H: is Logical)



Now what I want to know is in what way is Case 1 advantageous over Case 2
and vice versa?? Again by "advantage" I mean performance of Windows.

Also you can see from the screenshot that Disk 2 and Disk 3 are set as active. How do I make them non-active without having to format them??This is extracted from here.

"The only benefit to making one big extended partition and creating all "DRIVES" as logical partitions is if you are going to use resizing software (Partition Magic, BootIt NG, etc). You can move, shrink and expand the logical partitions. You can move, shrink and expand the primary partition(s).

BUT, you can not easily resize a primary partition and move some of its space into the extended partition (to add to a logical drive or create another one). "

Hope this helps.And only one Primary Partition can be active at a time.Thanks Dusty & GX1_man for the replies.

Dusty,
So are you saying that as far as performance goes there is no difference between Case 1 and Case 2??

GX1_man,
Yes its true that only one primary partition can be active at a time, but as you can see from the screenshot that three primary partitions are active SIMULTANEOUSLY. What I want is how to make the partitions in Disk 1 and Disk 2 non-active.That is my understanding, but if there is a seek-time degradation with your setup it will be measured in single-digit nanoseconds.  Other considerations could be the type/manufacturer, rotation speed etc of each drive.  Obviously the faster drive should be one getting most use.

I think what GX means is that there can be only one active partition on each drive.  If you were multi-booting with a second OS on drive E: then that partition would have to be active.

Super Fdisk from here claims to be able to deactivate a partition.  I have no experience of this utility and do not know if there is any danger of losing data as a consequence of its use.  Take care.

Good luck

if you want to turn off the the entire hd you can do this in diskmgmt in the system 32 folder... It does not turn off individual partitions that I know of...

right click on the drive you want to make unavailable and go to properties click "do not use this device"


CAUTION::: I did this on my external usb hdd and when I restarted my comp and went to diskmgmt the drive no longer showed up so that I could turn it back on... after a little work I got it working by accident, ( dont know how) I think this is just because its usb drive.... if you do this to an internal drive you should be able to go back to diskmgmt and turn your dirves back on after restart but I dont have multiple drives to test it.... Quote

That is my understanding, but if there is a seek-time degradation with your setup it will be measured in single-digit nanoseconds.  Other considerations could be the type/manufacturer, rotation speed etc of each drive.  Obviously the faster drive should be one getting most use.

Super Fdisk from here claims to be able to deactivate a partition.  I have no experience of this utility and do not know if there is any danger of losing data as a consequence of its use.

That will be the case if you are taking about two different hard disks....right??
It won't be valid for two different partitions in the same hard disk.

Yes Super Fdisk did deactivate the partitions in the other two Hard Disks succesfully. Everything was done without a glitch. No data loss!!   Thanks a lot for that piece of info.