Basic disks and volumes
Basic disk storage supports partition-oriented disks. A basic disk is a physical disk that contains primary partitions, extended partitions, or logical drives. Partitions and logical drives on basic disks are also known as basic volumes. You can create up to four primary partitions, or three primary partitions and one extended partition, that contain logical drives.
If you are running Windows XP Professional and one or more of the following operating systems on the same computer, you must use basic volumes, because these operating systems cannot access data that is stored on dynamic volumes:
Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 or earlier
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me)
Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows 95
MS-DOS
so basically to sum it up it really doesn't matter if you don't know the difference as long as you know how to partition a basic or dynamic disk. I beleive volume is a generic term that can mean a primary partition or a logical drive, or even a extended partition. it's more acurate to say something like basic NTFS primary partition 2 on secondary hard disk on primary IDE controller or refer to it like the BIOS does and just say FAT32 logical drive K on HDD3 (means secondary device, secondary IDE controller). they label it 0-3 so HDD zero (0) means primary device on primary IDE controller. I've never seen a mobo that supports over 4 IDE deivices...unless you get an IDE controller card. I don't know how they number it with them installed
and as for what drive means.....well it can mean a lot of stuff. in hard disks it can mean any logical drive inside an extended partition which contains/ holds the logical drives. drive can also mean whatever the operating system (DOS, win98, ME, 2K, XP, whatever) assigns the logical drive or primary partitions as. you can change these letters in XP and 2K, and even DOS allows you to create virtual drives. this is how those fancy "virtual CD" programs work. drive can also mean the hardware...as in floppy disk drive FDD or hard disk drive HDD.....ect
