Creating An Extended Partition

At this point we now have the System partition where XP is installed and another partition, Programs, where the applications will be installed. It's considered good practice to keep your data separated from the operating system and the applications so I'm going to create another partition named Data Files expressly for that purpose. Unlike the previous section where a Primary Partition was created for applications, the Data Files partition is going to be a Logical Drive. Since Logical drives can only exist on Extended partitions this becomes a two part process; creating the Extended partition followed by the Logical drive creation.

The process of creating a new partition can be started in two ways, the first step being to click the Unallocated space in the graphical section of the display. Then either go to the menu and select Action > All Tasks > New Partition... or just right click the Unallocated space in the graphical display and select New Partition... to begin. In Fig. 01 I used the latter method.

Fig. 01

The Welcome to the New Partition Wizard [Fig. 02] will open and provide some basic information about what can be accomplished with the Wizard.

Fig. 02

The first item on the agenda is to select the type of partition to be created. Because I'm creating a partition in unallocated space there are only two options available; Primary and Extended partition. The Logical choice is grayed out because no Extended partition exists and logical drives can only be created in an Extended partition. I've included two screen captures[Figs. 03 and 04] of the same screen with different options selected so the text in the Description area is available that describes the difference between Primary and Extended partitions.

Fig. 03

A question that's often asked is why one would choose to create an Extended partition rather than a Primary partition. Truthfully, I don't have a technical answer for that question, but that's not to say one doesn't exist. I'm sure I'll hear from many users with the technical answer, but for now if you know to fair degree of certainty that you won't want more than four volumes on the disk you can use Primary partitions. If you do want more than four volumes then the choice would be Extended partition as is indicated by the Description section of Fig. 04. Functionally, I've never found there to be any difference in how the two types operate, other than the fact you can start operating systems from Primary partitions where that isn't possible with an Extended partition. For this example I chose to create an Extended partition.

Fig. 04

Once the partition type has been selected it's time to specify the partition size. The minimum and maximum size values are shown [Fig. 05] so it's only a matter of typing in the desired partition size. It's worth noting that the New Partition Wizard works in megabytes (MB) rather than gigabytes (GB) so adjust your thinking accordingly before entering a number or you're likely to end up with a partition that's sized much differently than what you intended. Entering a decimal point will return an error message.

Remember that we are in part one of a two step process. In this part we are creating the Extended partition, not the Logical drive. At this point you have a choice between making the Extended partition larger than the size of the Logical drive you intend to make - or - making it the same size as the Logical drive that will be created. I've opted for the latter option by setting the Extended partition to 5000 MB.

Fig. 05

Review the selected settings [Fig. 06] and click the [Finish] button. The process will begin immediately with no further user intervention.

Fig. 06

The Wizard has completed and the first step of the two step process is complete. Using the color coded key at the bottom [Fig. 07] you can see that an Extended partition has been created and contains 4.88 GB of Free Space that can be used to create Logical drives. The Unallocated Space has been reduced by an amount equivalent to the space that was allocated to the Extended Partition. No drive letter was assigned to the Extended Partition because it is only a container for Logical drives that will be assigned drive letters as you'll see in the next section.

Fig. 07

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