Change drive from logical to Primary

[Old Geaser]

I just installed a couple partitions using win7. Went fine except for 1
problem. I had read that the first 3 partitions would be primary. After
installing it shows them as Logical. I plan on installing win xp on one of
the new drives using a dual boot. I believe I read somewhere that xp has to
be on a primary drive. Any comments on this? Any advice on how to change to
Primary? Thanks

Bert

 

[Seth]

I just installed a couple partitions using win7. Went fine except for 1
problem. I had read that the first 3 partitions would be primary. After
installing it shows them as Logical. I plan on installing win xp on one of
the new drives using a dual boot. I believe I read somewhere that xp has to
be on a primary drive. Any comments on this? Any advice on how to change to
Primary? Thanks

You can't "change" a logical drive to a Primary partition. The logical
drive is actually a sub-partition within an extended partition.

If there is no data yet, you can delete the logical drive. Then, if there
are other logical drives within the extended partition shrink the partition
down thus freeing up space to make a new Primary Partition in.

 

[Old Geaser]

I will try installing xp on a partition. If it does not work, I might look
into installing another small hard drive and have xp only on that. Thanks

Bert

 

[Alzaman]

You can have a maximum of 4 primary partitions on your system.

If you have other drives, logical not primary, then you have what's called
an extended partition - basically a doorway to the logical partitions .. you
can have numerous logical partitions.

But, if you have logical drives, then the extended partition uses one of the
primary spaces, reducing your maximum primary partitions to 3.

If you choose to install XP then install it to the partition you named "XP"
or similar, during the XP setup, so you don't install it to the Windows 7
partition.

Al