Question: What are the major differences? Which is more preferable? Are there any OS specific advantages for one over the other?
Answer: In the legacy MBR partition scheme, only at most four partitions can be created (they are called “primary” partitions). To bypass this limit, one of the entries is usually made an “extended” partition �C instead of files, it contains several “logical” partitions.
MBR: < primary | primary | primary | primary >MBR: < primary | primary | extended [logical, logical, logical] >
In practice, the only difference is that some operating systems (namely Windows) are unable to boot from logical partitions.
A newer partition scheme, GPT, is used on some recent systems, including all Intel Macs �C it doesn’t have such small limits, and does not need to use extended/logical partitions.