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.
Contrast with dynamic disk.
