Kent West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > So I can have three primary partitions, and then the fourth and final "slot" > functions as a pointer to another table? (Or two and two, or four primaries, > or 1 and 3, etc?) Is the extended partition table limited to 4 partitions as > well, so that if I wanted 8 partitions I could have 3 primary, 1 extended > pointing to 3 others (3+3=6), and the fourth extended "slot" pointing to a > third table (second extended) holding the final ((3+3-6)+1=7)?
>From the `Partition' mini-HOWTO (file:/usr/doc/HOWTO/Partition.gz): For compatibility reasons, the space occupied by all logical partitions had to be accounted for. If you are using logical partitions, one primary partition entry is marked as "extended partition" and its starting and ending block mark the area occupied by your logical partitions. This implies that the space assigned to all logical partitions has to be contiguous. There can be only one extended partition: no fdisk program will create more than one extended partition. Linux cannot handle more than a limited number of partitions per drive. So in Linux you have 4 primary partitions (3 of them useable, if you are using logical partitions) and at most 15 partitions altogether on an SCSI disk (63 altogether on an IDE disk). So to get 8 partitions, you could have 3 primaries, and one extended holding 5 logical partitions. Or 2 primary and 6 logical partitions. Or 1+7, or 0+8. -- David Zelinsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
