a. 1
4
Four partitions.
4
4
There's a limit to the number of primary partitions per drive, 4. In order to get more than 4 drives out of one (if this takes your fancy) then you use an extended partition. To a low level program which doesnt speak fluent windows, everything on your extended partition appear as a single drive. Other than this their is no real advantage to extended partitions over primary partitions, but at windows level no significant disadvantage either
A technician is attempting to create multiple partitions on a hard disk. This will allow for storing the operating system and data files on separate partitions. What is the maximum number of primary partitions per hard drive that is supported by Windows XP?
4 ----- Dhyan Tripathi You can have 4 primary partitions, or 3 primary partitions and one extended partition containing any number of logical partitions. While you can assign a drive letter to a partition, you can also map it as
4.
The minimum number of partitions needed to dual boot windows xp and windows vista is actually 2, one for each operating system. However, if your computer was bought and it already had one of those two systems preinstalled and with it a separate windows recovery partition as well as a system reserved partition, then your minimum in that case would be 4 priamry partitions (which also happens to be the maximum allowed if you are using strictly primary partitions. One way to have more than 4 primary partitions is to have one of those partitions become an extended partition which can in turn have as many partitions as you need. I hope that wasn't too confusing
Due to limitations imposed by DOS back in the '80s, ATA (the proper name for ide) and SATA drives can only hold 4 partitions. To work around this, extended partitions were invented. Extended partitions can hold 4 more partitions, any of which can be more extended partitions. Thus the number of partitions is effectively limited by the size of the disk. These limitations aren't imposed by the disk itself, rather the PC architecture. Intel macs, which don't need to maintain compatibility with DOS or old versions of windows use EFI, which allows for 128 primary partitions.
On normal SATA it is 15. IDEs is much more, 64 i think. Or maybe double or trible. But if you are using fdisk from terminal in linux, it is noo problem to make more than 15 partitions on a SATA. I made 60 before it hit the max. These are empty partitions which are now easily modified by programs like gparted.
When any hard disk is initialised one of the things that will happen is the number and size of partitions is calculated and created. The size of the disk and the operating system will be a big factor on how many and what size are the partititions
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