What are the differences between primary and logical partition?
What are the major differences? Which is more preferable? Are there any OS specific advantages for one over the other?
In the legacy MBR partition scheme, only at most four partitions can be created (they are called "primary" partitions). To bypass this limit, one of the entries is usually made an "extended" partition – instead of files, it contains several "logical" partitions.
MBR: < primary | primary | primary | primary >
MBR: < primary | primary | extended [logical, logical, logical] >
In practice, the only difference is that some operating systems (namely Windows) are unable to boot from logical partitions.
A newer partition scheme, GPT, is used on some recent systems, including all Intel Macs – it doesn't have such small limits, and does not need to use extended/logical partitions.
You can have only 4 primary partitions (3 if you decide to have an extended partition), whereas you can have an arbitrary number of logical partitions. There are no OS-specific advantages other than older versions of Windows must be installed on a primary partition and that the legacy MBR bootloader can only boot from a primary partition.
There are 3 kinds of partitions
- Primary
- Extended
- Logical
And two types of partitioning scheme used now a days
- MBR (Master Boot Record)
- GPT (GUID Partition Table)
Primary partition, extended partition, and logical partition are much related to MBR disk, because GPT disk only contains primary partition.
On an MBR disk, there can only be 4 primary partitions or 3 primary + 1 extended partition at most.
We can install OS and save our data on any of partitions kind (primary/logical), but the only difference is that some operating systems (namely Windows) are unable to boot from logical partitions.
An active partition is based on primary partition. Any one of the 4 primary partitions can be set as active partition. Since there can be 4 primary partitions with 4 different Operating Systems installed, one of the partition that is marked active is used for the initial booting. The active partition contains the boot loader (e.g. ntldr, bootmgr or grub/burg/lilo) to load operating systems from a disk.
BIOS will only recognize the active partition for loading operating system. Other partitions can’t be recognized.
The logical partition can't be set as active. As here explained.
Full Source : Wikipedia