Hi, I have an 80 Gig HDD that I'm using as an Extended Partition, I have a 20 gig volume already in use. Now when I partition a new volume on the HDD, say another 20 Gigs, everything works fine, but the volume isn't listed under Explorer. I have to go to Admin Tools, Comp. Managment, Disk Management, then right click on the volume in order to explore it! I can store data on the volume, but why won't it show up under Windows Explorer? This is what I have on Explorer: 3 1/2 Floppy (A:) Local Disk (C:) CD Drive (D:) DVD Drive (E:) Extended (F:) But not Games (G:). Why?

If I remember right, there is a four partition limit for a drive under Windows....

What are you using to create the g:\ partition? The XP cd makes it very easy with diskpart.

I'm using the Disk Management under Admin Tools to create and format the new drive. Is there really a four partition limit? Does that include the optical drives? As it is, I have just 2 data volumes, C:, and F: on a different HDD. I'm using XP Pro, BTW...

No, that is not true, from a website, "Within the extended partition, you can create any number of logical drives. As a practical matter, the number of available drive letters is the limiting factor in the number of logical drives that you can define." Here is that website http://www.ntfs.com/logdrives.htm If you slip in the XP cd I think it's the recovery console and type "diskpart" it's much like f-disk and very easy. I think you need to boot from the cd to get to diskpart. That website says if you need more than 4 partitions on a physical disk the first partition should be a primary partition. Here's another site http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/structPartitions-c.html it says that you are limited to 4 primary partitions per disk but you can make one of them an extended partition with any number of logical drives on it. Hope this helps.

Well, I haven't exceeded the four partition limit then, because I have one partition on each of the two hard drives. C is on one hard drive, F is on the other, and F is using only 1/4 of that drive. So in essence, G would be the second partition on one hard drive. Also, I used Disk Management to partition the F drive, and it works fine and I can view it from Explorer. I have heard that you can hide a drive from being viewed by Explorer, and I was wondering if reversing certain steps would allow me to view it, but it involves editing the Registry and I'm not too sure about that.

Actually I guess Lucid is right you can only have a max of 4 partitions per harddrive but you can break down a extended partition into alot of lot of logical drives. Although when using the XP cd it didn't make me aware of the differences between extended and logical it just asked if I would like to use the whole remaining room for the partition I was working on at the time, I said no and set a certain amount , made a partition, then I went to the next one. In the disk management it shows as one extended partition with two logical drives. But in windows explorer it shows as 3 different drives. It must have did this automatically.