What is basic disk?

A basic disk is a type of physical disk that can be accessed by MS-DOS and all Windows-based operating systems. A basic disk contains up to four primary partitions, or three primary partitions and an extended partition with multiple logical drives. To create partitions on a basic disk, which span multiple disks, the basic disk must be converted to a dynamic disk by using Disk Management or the DISKPART.EXE command-line tool.