i understand what a partition is, basicly cuting the hard drive into two drives, however i dont get the what volumes are. from what i understand they sound the same.
Volumes are basically the same thing but with added features. They can be implemented on Windows 2000/XP/2003. They are not as limited as partitions and can do things such as spanning multiple drives and also provide fault tolerance.
Partitions are used on basic disks and volumes are used on dynamic disks.