In DOS FDISK, what are Primary, Extended, and Active partitions?
Old DOS versions of the FDISK command allow you to create up to four partitions on your hard drive. One of the partitions can be designated a Primary partition, and the others have to be Extended. The Primary partition will be the one used to boot the computer; you should format it so that DOS or some other operating system resides on this partition. A partition must also be designated Active, otherwise the BIOS (the on-chip program that starts when the computer is turned on) will ignore that partition, even if it is designated Primary. Using more recent versions of FDISK, you can create, on each physical drive, one Primary DOS partition and one Extended DOS partition. In addition, the Extended DOS partition may be further subdivided into several “logical” or “virtual” drives.
