Questions regarding logical, primary, active and inactive partitions

Question

I have 3 HDD's.

• HDD 1 partitioned into C, F, G
• HDD 2 into D
• HDD 3 into E, H

My system is in HDD 1 on C.

• C is primary and active, F & G are logical and inactive.
• D is primary and inactive.
• E is primary and inactive, H is logical and inactive.

Now what I don't get is why I can change E from primary to logical. I always thought in a HDD first partition always had to be primary then the following ones logical. So why can I change E into logical? And why can't I change D into logical?

And what differences are there between inactive and active?

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Answer 1

You need to understand what is a primary, logical and extended partition. Primary partitions can become extended partitions. Primary extended partitions do not directly contain the file system data, but they contain logical partitions that contain the file system data.

You can change E to logical by adding it to the same extended partition that contains H.

HDD 3 currently has no logical partition. As logical partitions are created within extended partitions, you may need to create first the extended partition that contains the logical partition. This may be preventing from converting the D drive.

Some boot loaders only boot the partition marked active (windows boot loaders do this), other boot loaders disregard this. You can mark one partition (primary or logical) active in a hard drive.