Hi...

Well i just recieved my new 80 Gb Hard Drive, and installed it, put on Win XP etc etc, and i looked in XP's Computer Management and it says that i have 2 primary partitions on the one drive - is that normal??? I don't think so...

This is what it says...

.......................|.......................| -----Extended Partition-----|
Primary Partition | Primary Partition | Logical Drive | Logical Drive |
-------C:-------|--------D:-------|------E:-----|------F:-----|

It doesn't report any errors, neither does Partition Magic 7.0...

I thought you were supposed to have 1 primary partition, and the rest was an extended partition containing logical drives???

Or am i a complete buffoon, and this is all normal and ok???

Hope i explained myself properly....
Cheers...

Yes, that's just fine.

There are a limit of the number of primary partitions you can have, though.

Cheers Phantasm66...

Once again, you've come up trumps....:grinthumb

Thats 16 Pints i owe you now...

Just another thing...

When i installed the new drive, BIOS auto-detected it and put in the relevant info, ie: sectors, heads, cylinders etc, and i checked on the Western Digital website, and they had a different configuration.

Should i leave it as it seems to be working fine, or should i manually change it to what WD says???

Thanks again...

Ooopps...

Should of probably started a new thread...

Generally speaking its safe to go with the geometry that the BIOS has detected the HDD as.

Certainly if you can see all of the disk and there isn't a problem.

If you have a choice of geometries, I usually go with LBA mode.

I don't think you will have any major problems.