UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

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Chapter 4—SCSI and IDE Hard Drives and Optical Drives
With FDISK, the partitions shown earlier must be created in the following
order:
1. Create the primary partition to occupy less than 100% of
disk space at the size you choose up to any limits imposed
by your operating system.
2. Create an extended partition to use the remainder of disk
space unused by the primary partition.
3. Create one or more logical DOS drives to occupy the
extended partition.
4. Before leaving FDISK, make the primary partition (C:) active
to enable it to boot.
Assigning Drive Letters with FDISK
You can use FDISK in many ways, depending on the number of
hard drives you have in your system and the number of drive letters
you want to create.
With a single drive, creating a primary partition (C:) and an
extended partition with two logical DOS drives within it will result
in the following drives, as you saw earlier:
Partition Type Contains Drive Letter(s)
Primary C:
Extended D: and E:
A second drive added to this system should have drive letters that
follow the E: drive.
However, you must understand how drive letters are allocated by
the system to know how to use FDISK correctly in this situation.
Table 4.25 shows how FDISK assigns drive letters by drive and partition
type.
Table 4.25 Drive Letter Allocations by Drive and Partition Type
Drive Partition Order First Drive Letter
1st Primary 1st C:
2nd Primary 2nd D:
1st Extended 3rd E:
2nd Extended 4th F: or higher
How does this affect you when you add another hard drive? If you
prepare the second hard drive with a primary partition and your