Disk Drives, Basic, Dynamic

On a master boot record (MBR) disk, on a Basic disk, you can create up to four primary partitions, or three primary partitions and one extended partition. Primary partitions can not have multiple logical drives, extended partitions can have multiple logical drives. As many as you want. Each logical has a letter. Extended does not have a letter. Only 1 primary partition is the active partition. An unlimited number of logical drives per extended partition is theoretically possible. Basic volume is a primary partition, or (primary) logical drive, that resides on a basic disk. In other words, volume and partition are synonymous, except volume refers to the logical naming of the partition with a letter. Drive or partition that the system boots from, the Active Partition, always gets named the C drive, when you have booted to the op sys on that partition.
While the drive that the system boots from is sometimes called the active partition, it is more often called the system partition. If you have a windows multiboot setup, the drive that has the operating system on it, with the ntldr file, is called the “boot” partition. Names system and boot seemed reversed. The computer boots from the system partition and the actual functioning operating system is on the boot partition. The boot partition changes, depending upon what partition you have booted to. Probably that is why it is called the boot partition - they meant the booted-to partion - where the currently functioning op system is. So the partition you have booted to, which has the currently functioning operating system, is called the "boot" partition, and the partition you have booted from, which has the program files that are used to initiate the booting process, is called the system partition. I think the same partition can be both a boot partition and a system partition. Which partition is the active partition? I think the one where your op sys is currently running.
The convert command can be used to convert a drive or volume to ntfs (from fat32). Do convert /?. Convert d: /fs:ntfs
Dynamic disk. A dynamic volume is a volume that resides on a dynamic disk. There are 5 kinds of dynamic volumes, simple, spanned, striped, mirrored, and RAID 5. Dynamic disks can support up to 2,000 dynamic volumes per disk (although the recommended number of volumes is 32 or less. You can extend certain simple volumes, and spanned volumes.
With dynamic storage, you can perform disk and volume management without the need to restart Windows.
After you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, local access to the dynamic disk is limited to Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 or later. Additionally, after you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, the dynamic volumes cannot be changed back to basic partitions. You must first delete all dynamic volumes on the disk and then convert the dynamic disk back to a basic disk. So if you want to keep your data, you must first back up the data or move it to another volume.
A basic or dynamic disk can contain any combination of FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS partitions or volumes.
If you dual-boot or multi-boot to a Linux or Unix operating system, you can also have the kind of partition that Linux or Unix uses, however Windows won't recognize what kind it is. Generally, Linux or Unix will recognize the Windows partitions.
A disk system can contain any combination of storage types. However, all volumes on the same disk must use the same storage type.
Spanned volumes are organized sequentially—that is, Array Manager sequentially allocates space on each disk until that disk is full and then continues with the next disk until the volume size is reached.
Simple or spanned volumes can be extended. On a basic disk, to contiguous space on the same disk. On a dynamic disk, to any empty space on the disk, or to more (dynamic) disks. After a volume is extended to more than one disk, thus making it a spanned volume if it was previously a simple volume, no portion of it can be deleted without deleting the entire spanned volume. Spanning volumes across multiple disk controllers is not recommended.
Striped volumes are created by combining areas of free space on two or more disks into one logical volume. Data is divided into blocks and spread in a fixed order among all the disks in the volume. With a striped volume, data is written to multiple disks, similar to spanned volumes. However, striping writes files across all disks so that data is added to all disks at the same rate. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20061022233412AAqXU0h
Disk striping improves performance (data access speed). Heads write simultaneously. To improve fault tolerance, add parity.
RAID 0 striping (speed), RAID 1 mirroring (fault tolerance), RAID 5 striping with parity (speed plus fault tolerance). Parity is striped (as opposed to being on dedicated drive). Parity info can be used to rebuild data if one disk of the array (or part of the disk) is lost.
RAID is commonly done on SCSI but can be done on IDE. 0 is striping. 1 is mirroring. 5 is 0 plus 1.