There can only be 4 primary partitions. You can make them any size the
fat supports. I believe fat16 can only go as high as 2GB per partition
size.
A logical partition does not mean unallocated space, it is typically
used to hold additional partitions that are not primary bootable
partitions. There's no need to have a partition be a primary one if it
isn't going to be bootable, logical partitions do typically contain all
disk space that is not allocated to primary partitions. With a dos
partition, you can make the primary partition the booting partition,
then create a logical partition, and create additional unbootable
partitions inside that logical one, these can typically be any
size/type, again, subject to file allocation table size restrictions.
Also, for what it's worth, DOS can handle up to 32 disk letters, with
the additional letters after Z being such punctuation marks as [, \, ],
^, _ and `.
These are the characters in the ascii table between the lower and upper
case versions of the alphabet in the ascii table.
I've personally never used more than 26 drive letters and that was when
I had an 18-disc cd-rom disk changer that had 3 6-disc cartridges, so
adding that after two floppy drives, 2 hds, a zip drive, and a few ram
drives, I pushed the alphabet all the way to the letter Z, but I never
did test the capabilities of adding drives beyond that.
Of course, drive letters can be as many or as few logical partition
additions as you want, so that does make it possible to run your disc
count pretty high, especially these days what with disks being so large,
hitting 32 drive letters shouldn't be all that difficult. :)
On 3/13/2026 10:19 PM, Ray Davison via Freedos-user wrote:
Ray Davison via Freedos-user wrote:
The empty HDD apparently calls itself MBR type. But it was shipped
as the current system which I have no understanding of, and I may
have destroyed.
A partition manager lists all partitions as primary, and all unallocated
space as logical. I created all the partitions after wiping the HDD.
I am now unable to create a partition in unallocated space - "There
are no free MBR slots on the disk.
Have I broke something?
TY
Ray
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