Basic Disk is a physical disk that can contain primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives.
What is Basic Disk?
In Microsoft Windows, a physical disk that can contain primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives. Basic disks can be accessed by MS-DOS and legacy Windows platforms. Basic disks can also contain volumes created using Windows NT version 4.0 or earlier, such as spanned volumes (volume sets), striped volumes (stripe sets), mirrored volumes (mirror sets), and RAID-5 volumes (stripe sets with parity).
Basic disks are the default type of disk in Windows 2000. All disks are basic disks unless you convert them to dynamic disks. Basic disks can have two kinds of partitions:
- Primary partitions: Basic disks support up to four primary partitions, only one of which can be marked as active.
- Extended partitions: Basic disks support only one extended partition, which can be further subdivided into logical drives or logical volumes.
NOTE
You can create only basic volumes on basic disks. You cannot create new simple, spanned, striped, mirrored, or RAID-5 volumes on basic disks.
