What Is Logical and Primary Partition?

  • Logical Partition

    A partition created within an extended partition on a basic disk, also called logical drive but actually a partition or volume. It can be formatted and assigned a drive letter.

  • Primary Partition

    A partition type which can be created on basic disk. It is a part of physical disk and works like a physically dependent disk.

  • Extended partition

    An HDD may contain only one extended partition, but that extended partition can be subdivided into multiple logical partitions.

Difference between Primary and Logical Partition

In general, Logical partitions function like primary partitions except the following parts.

Partition Type Can be used to install OS Maximum number on MBR disk
Primary Partition Yes Four
Logical Partition No No limit

Explanation

The number limit on MBR disk is all depend on disk type (MBR or GPT). On a MBR disk, there can be at most four primary partitions (no logical partition in such situation). If you want to create one more partition (logical), you have to make one primary partition extended first and then create logical partitions on the extended partition. An extended partition can hold logical partitions with no limit. There’s no division of logical and logical partition on GPT disk.

How to Convert between Logical and Primary Partition?

Microsoft Management Console (MMC) has no snap-in tool for this conversion, neither Disk Management (DM) nor Diskpart or other command order. Then, we have to resort to a third party software, AOMEI Partition Assistant, a professional and powerful disk partition manager.