A physical disk that contains primary
partitions, extended partitions, or logical drives.
Basic disks can be accessed by all versions of Windows,
MS-DOS, and Windows NT.
Basic disks can contain up to four primary partitions, or three primary
partitions and an extended partition with multiple logical drives. Upgrading a
basic disk to dynamic disk will render the
entire disk unreadable to operating systems other than
Windows 2000.
Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000 In Windows 2000, a new storage type has been defined and exposed in the new Logical Disk Management snap-in; previous versions of Windows NT used only basic storage.
How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP This step-by-step article describes how to use the Windows XP Disk Management snap-in to configure a basic disk and prepare it for use. This article also describes how to create and delete partitions, and how to format volumes with the FAT, FAT32, or NTFS file systems.
