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Is there a limit to how many Partition ?

Discussion in 'PC Hardware' started by TerryFox, 2006/03/17.

  1. 2006/03/17
    TerryFox Lifetime Subscription

    TerryFox Well-Known Member Thread Starter

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    Hi ... Is there a limit as to how many partitions you can create on one hard drive ? Thanks
     
    TerryFox,
    #1
  2. 2006/03/17
    rsinfo

    rsinfo SuperGeek Alumni

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    Differs for different OS. For example, DOS & 9x could use 2 partitions only - Primary & Extended (Extended partitions could have a number of logical drives). Have no accurate info for XP but it could be 26 (no.of characters from A - Z) for basic disk.
     
    rsinfo,
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  4. 2006/03/18
    PeteC

    PeteC SuperGeek Staff

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    rsinfo has it right :)

    You are limited by the number of letters in the alphabet, starting from C and bearing in mind that the optical drive(s), pen drives and external hard drives are also assigned drive letters. This applies regardless of whether or not you have more than one hard drive. Not sure what the minimum size might be, but suspect 8 Mb and you can have only 4 primary partitions on a disk - AFAIK.

    FWIW - I have 3 hard drives installed with 17 - at the last count :) partitions, a couple of writers, assigned drive letters for a pen drive and external hard drive, leaving only 3 drive letters for a 4th hard drive. (Running at present 2 x SATA, not in RAID and 1 x PATA drives).
     
    PeteC,
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  5. 2006/03/18
    TopFarmer

    TopFarmer Well-Known Member

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    The above post are basicly correct.
    WIN98 fdisk will only make 1 primary partition but useing a third party progam can make more.

    The MBR (master boot record) has only 4 positions for partitions. You can have 4 primary or 3 primary and 1 extended partition , the extended partition can have multiple extended volumes in it. One can use a third party boot manager and have more then 4 primary partitions, I currently have 9 primary and 1 extended volume on a 120 g hdd, but can only see 4 pri or 3 pri and 1 extended partition at a time. (I mult boot with 5 Win98, 1 XP,1 Linux)
     
    TopFarmer,
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  6. 2006/03/18
    TerryFox Lifetime Subscription

    TerryFox Well-Known Member Thread Starter

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    Okay , Thats just what I wanted to hear , Thanks ! I have a 100gb drive that I am going to try to do 10 partition , It just a experiment , Mostly its going to be used to install Linux OS , I want to see how many I can install on one drive , Yeah I know Linux isn't Windows :D
     
    TerryFox,
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