From: "Rob Shane"
>When performing fdisk on a second hard drive, you are
>given the option of creating a second primary dos partition
>(Drive "c" being the first) or an extended dos partition.
>What is the difference and is one better than the other.

The way I use computers, it was never "necessary" for me to
have more than one Primary Partition on the same physical
spindle. That said, here is what background I have for that decision...

Having a "physical spindle" with more than one Primary partition
would be necessary if you were trying to use more than one
OS, and the second OS required a Primary Partition, (and you
could not make one somewhere else).
Disclaimer: I do not multi-boot in the "normal" use of that term.

One other reason would be to have the drive letters assigned differently
at the BIOS and/or post level. In general, (most BIOSs?) and older OSs
go assigning drive letters to Primary Partitions first, then look for other
types.  The newer (Windows) OSs have largely made that a moot point
since drive letters can be switched around at will, with the exception of
the actual "active C" or current "Booting drive partition").

You "could" use tricks like this for other reasons such as trying to
get the drive letters the same in the OS and any low level utility you
might run later, (especially from outside the OS), but seeing drive letters
differently sometimes is always a possibility and hard to overcome.
(Be very careful using utilities. Make sure the drive letters did not
get assigned differently...)

As I said, there may be other reasons I do not know about.

        Hope that helped and did not muddy the waters too much...

                                              Rick Glazier

              The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech
                     support at our newest website:
                          http://freepctech.com