Creating The Extended Partition - Gateway DX4320 Hardware Installation Manual

Chapter 6: Setting up the New Drive Manually

Creating the extended partition

The extended DOS partition is a portion of a hard drive where non-system files
can be stored. Your computer does not require an extended partition to
function. The hard drive can have four primary partitions or three primary
partitions and one extended partition.
A logical drive is an area of the extended DOS partition that you can set up to
group directories and files. You must set up an extended DOS partition before
you can create a logical drive. You can create as many as 23 logical drives in
an extended DOS partition.
Because FAT32 lets your computer address up to 1 TB of drive space per partition
and NTFS lets your computer address all of the drive space as one partition,
you only need to make an extended partition when:
■
You choose to create more than one partition
■
The primary partition is created with another file system (Windows NT 4.0
users)
Important
46
Primary
Logical
Drive
Partition
(D:)
(C:)
Hard Drive
The FDISK program is not available in Windows XP. A
primary partition is created when Windows XP is installed
on the hard drive. During the Windows XP installation
process, you can also select the size and type of other
partitions. If you leave any part of the hard drive
unpartitioned, you can create the extended partition and
assign logical drives by following the procedures "To create
an extended partition using Windows XP NTFS:" on
page 48 and "To create a logical drive using Windows XP
NTFS:" on page 49. Although Windows XP can use FAT16
and FAT32 partitions, we recommend that you use NTFS
for all partitions.
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Logical Logical Logical
Drive Drive Drive
(E:) (F:) (G:)
Extended Partition