some questions about disk partitions

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I was just on the managing windows operating system tools practice lab and got to where it deals with partitions, I have a few questions in regards to this I was wondering what does "Logical" mean, I also noticed that it mentions that if you have one hard disk in a computer you can create an "Unallocated Logical Segment" what exactly is this? is this something like where you could do something like having it show up as a separate drive letter on the computer? I also saw it mention something about an active partition, which I know that is where you have the operating system installed, but it says that only one partition can be active at a time, so given that only one can be active at a time, what if I wanted/needed to put two operating systems at a time on it for dual booting say ubuntu, and windows, how would I go back and fourth between the two if only one can be active at a time?

Hey @Jeff-Rielly can you direct to the specific lab?

The term "Logical" goes back to the restrictions when using the MBR-based partitioning scheme. The limit specifies 4 primary partitions maximum, unless one of the partitions on the disk is an "Extended" partition, then you could get past that 4 partition limitation, by creating "logical" volumes, in other words divid up the extended partition's space into as many containers (logical drives/volumes) as needed. The term "unallocated" means that there is "empty space" on the disk that does not have a partition(and file system) applied to it.

When the Windows Bootloader from the active partition, reads the OS to load it will look to the BCD information to determine which Windows OS to boot, in a dual boot situation the OS selection screen will be presented, if you choose a Linux installation, the Windows BL will pass control of the hardware over to a GRUB bootloader. UEFI-based systems ignore an active partition flag as it will use a GUID partition identifier. If you install the Grub bootloader (Linux) it will over write the Windows bootloader and point the system to Windows when you choose to boot Windows from a multi-OS selection screen.