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.