Windows Vista™ Administrator's Pocket Consultant

Working with Disks, Partitions, and Volumes

Before you can store data on a physical disk, you must prepare the disk for use by partitioning its space, assigning a drive designator, and formatting the resulting partitions or volumes. Although basic disks can have up to four primary partitions—or three primary partitions and one extended partition, with one or more logical drives in the extended partition—dynamic disks can have an unlimited number of volumes.

After partitioning a disk, you must assign each partition or volume a drive designator. The drive designator can be a letter or a path. You use drive letters to access file systems in various partitions on physical drives. Generally speaking, the drive letters A through Z are available. However, ...