[lancebass]

I already have the OS on the main partition running right now. When setting up my second partition which should I select?? It will be for data and not an operating system.

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nothing???

[lancebass]

nothing???

[peterm]

Hi Lancebass.
Hope this explains it for you it depends on what you want to do.

Primary partition
A primary partition can be directly addressed as a drive and cannot be additionally partitioned. The operating system is usually installed on a primary partition. The operating system can therefore start from an active partition.

The boot procedure for the computer involves several steps that occur in the following sequence:1. The BIOS runs the power-on self test (POST).
2. The BIOS looks for the starting device. This is usually the hard disk.
3. The BIOS loads the MBR when it starts from the hard disk.
4. The MBR determines the active partition.
5. The MBR loads the boot sector from the active partition.
6. The boot sector initializes loading of the operating system.

Extended partition and logical drive
An extended partition cannot be addressed directly as a drive. It is just a container. An extended partition enables you to incorporate logical drives. Individual partition tables instead of the MBR manage these logical drives. These tables are also named EBRs (Extended Boot Records), and they are based on the MBR. The most notable feature of EBRs is that they are interlinked like a chain. This means that the number of logical drives is not limited by the capacity of the partition table, but by the number of free drive letters.
Possible partitions
The hard disk can be partitioned as follows:• One primary partition
• One primary partition and one extended partition with logical drives
• Two primary partitions and one extended partition with logical drives
• Three primary partitions and one extended partition with logical drives
• Four primary partitions
• One extended partition with logical drives for a hard disk that cannot be used for the boot procedure.

Cheers
Peterm

[lancebass]

by reading that it looks more like I should set up an extended partition? All I am going to do is use it to store video and music files and such things as that. I do not want performance to be affected though. Are they both going to perform the same (speed wise)? I am worried about video playback.

[peterm]

I would use extended