Data Storage - How many partitions can a single physical hard drive have on a Windows XP OS?

Author

How many partitions can a single physical hard drive have on a Windows XP OS?

slippyaah

2006-03-05, 1:35 am

I'm in the process of partitioning and formatting a Lacie 1TB drive to use as backup and storage but after creating 4 partitions I've come across a problem.

I'm using the Windows XP (Pro) Disk Management Console to do the partitioning work. The disk shows up fine and for the first 4 partitions I right clicked on the drive, selected "create partition" and then specified the details before formatting. When I went to create the 5th partition however using the same process the option to "create partition" is now greyed out.

I can't understand why this is and I have done a few reboots to see if it was some kind of glitch but no success. There doesn't seem to be any way to 'ungrey' it. Is there a maximum number of logical partitions a single hard drive can have? I would have thought this to be higher than 4 if so.

Thanks

slip

slippyaah

2006-03-05, 2:10 am

To give a clearer picture of what I mean I can provide an image of the problem in the Disk Management Console. I've tried attaching it to this post but it doesn't seem to work....

Tech Specs:

Microsoft Windows XP Pro OS
Service Pack 1
Lacie 1TB Disk Extreme Hard drive