No you don't, but there are some issues if you have just logical partitions, one of them is a hard drive space might not be used completely after formatting meaning you will have some space under unallocated region. To get rid of such things helps, for instance, Acronis Director Suite and other similar software.
A map to the partitions on the hard drive. This table tells BIOS how many partitions the drive has and how each partitions is divided into one or more logical drives, which partition contains the drive to be used for booting (called the active partition), and where each logical drive begins and ends.1-map to the partitions on on the hard drive2-information about where each logical drive is located, where it starts and where it ends3-which partition contains the drive to be used for booting (the active partition)The first is a map to the partitions on the harddrive,and how they are divided, the second, which partition contains the drive to be used for booting this is called the "Active Partition", and third where each logical begin and ends.
This table of information contained is,the table tells BIOS how many Partion the drive has and how each parition is divied into one or mone logical drivers and which partion contains the drive to be used for booting called the active boot and where each logical dive begins and ends
Each disk partition, regardless of whether there are more than one physical drives in the system, is given a drive letter.
Partitioning splits a drive into multiple parts, called partitions. Each partition exists as its own logical unit from the point of view of the operating system. This means that you can have one physical drive which has multiple logical partitions with different operating systems on it, each of which may or may not be aware of the other partitions and operating systems.
On desktop, click hard drive icon to select it. Go to file menu and select Get Info. (or simply "right-click" on hard drive icon and choose Get Info.) You will see "Capacity" of drive, and "Available" and "Used" space. Note: you may have several "hard drive icons" on a single physical drive. That is because the Mac treats each partition as a separate drive. To see all partitions, launch the "Disk Utility.app". On the left side, it will list all the partitions on each physical drive, whether mounted on the desktop or not. You can select any partition and click on "info" at top of the "Disk Utility" window to see space used and free space on that partition.
You need to create a partition on your hard drive. You can then install separate OS on each partition. Run BIOS to select which partition to boot from.
To partition something means to divide it into several parts that are held separate from each other. This is true whether the partition is of land, as in Palestine/Israel, or of a hard drive, such at the main drive of a computer.
Most brands of hard drive will work with a Mac. If you want to run both Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 you will need to partition the drive and install a separate operating system into each partition.
logical drives
A hard partition restructures the disc and each partition is recognised as a separate disc. A soft partition allows the operating system to recognise the partitions as separate discs but without changing the structure of the drive. Remember to always backup the contents of a disc before partitioning - even with a soft partition.
You can'tassigntwo different drives the same letter. If you are having an hard drive or hard disk then you can make different partition and then assign each partition differently, but can not assign same letter for two or more drives.
Partition Magic is a partition table editor. Every hard drive requires a partition table to be usable. However, partition tables also let you cut up the hard drive into chunks and assign each chunk a drive letter. Partitions can be used to organize data, boot from different operating systems, among other things. Partition Magic lets you create, delete, copy, move, check, convert, and rename partitions (assign different drive letters and give different label names). You can also change the block size of your partitions.