My best guess would be just one.
four primary
A basic disk contains 3 logical partitions, but only one of them can be the primary partition. This is only if the system has enough free space.
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
Ther can only be one Extended Partition per hard drive
Primary partition is only one
Assuming one of them is an extended partition on an MS-DOS partition table: Eight. If the partitions are all primary partitions: Four.
IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) can support a maximum of four primary partitions on a single hard drive. Alternatively, one of these primary partitions can be configured as an extended partition, which can contain multiple logical drives. This allows for a total of up to three primary partitions and potentially many logical drives within the extended partition.
Typically you can only have 4 primary partitions per hard drive if you are using the MBR partition layout scheme. If you need more partitions than the maximum allowed (4), then there is a way to get many more partitions with only one hard drive.By creating an extended partition you can have as many logical partitions as you need within that extended partition, thus you can have more than only four partitions. You can have 3 primary partitions and one extended partition (for a total of 4), and inside the extended partition you can have as many logical partitions as you need.The one thing to keep in mind is that any type of Windows Operating System needs to be installed in a primary partition, otherwise you cannot boot into it. Windows XP in particular, needs to be installed in the first primary partition. For everything else, you can create as many logical partitions as you want inside the extended partition.
The Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning system can support a maximum of four primary partitions. Alternatively, one of these primary partitions can be designated as an extended partition, which can contain multiple logical partitions, allowing for more than four partitions in total. However, the minimum number of partitions that MBR can support is one.
In Windows Server 2008, a physical drive using MBR partition style can have up to four primary partitions and one extended partition.
i have a new hard disk so what i should do ?
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