Partitions and Volumes
People often use these terms loosely, so I'll define what I mean when I use them...
A partition is an area of hard disk reserved for use via an entry in the partition table of that hard disk. Each operating system may recognize and use partitions of various types; the 'partition' concept is system-wide, not limited to a particular operating system.
The partition table is a list of 4 possible partitions that is held within the first sector of the hard drive, and is normally interpreted by code within the same sector if that hard drive is booted.
In contrast, a volume is an operating system concept. DOS and Windows maps drive letters to volumes, and in this sense, a volume is any entity that has a drive letter mapped to it.
A non-removable local disk volume may be a primary partition, a logical volume within an extended partition, or a file within another volume that is treated as a disk volume via disk compression or other driver-level software.
A removable local disk volume may be a CD, diskette, Zip disk, etc. or may be something plugged into a PCMCIA or PC Card slot.
A remote disk volume may be a remote LAN share mapped to a drive letter, or similar effect via more casual cabling (or no cabling, such as IR) using Direct Cable Connect.
Main confusion; talking about logical volumes on an extended partition as if they were partitions themselves. This distinction appears to be a matter of harmless semantics until you get into data recovery.
(C) Chris Quirke, all rights reserved - February 2001