Re: Help! What's with my partition table?

[Mark Dailey]

You are only allowed 4 primary partitions on a hard disk, and always have a device number 1-4 (eg hda1-hda4). In order to expand this limit, there is the concept of an extended partiion. This is a series of many 'logical' partitions which can be place 'inside' of a single primary partition. Your hda5 and hda6 are both extended partitions within the primary partition hda2. That is why hda5 and hda6 both disapear when you remove hda2. Also only primary partitions are bootable.   To correct it, you will want to use fdisk and remove hda2, then add back in hda2 and hda3 (new primary partitions). Mark them aproprisately and away you go. You will of course lose all the data on partitions 2,5,6. ----- Original Message ----- From: Omer J Hickman To: Mid-Willamette Valley Linux Users Group ; PLUG Announcement List ; Portland Linux User Group ; Eugene Linux Users List Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 10:03 AM Subject: Help! What's with my partition table? My Red Hat 6.2 systems partition table looks like this: (Linux fdisk output) ------------------------------------------------- Command (m for help): Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 977 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System /dev/hda1   *         1       784   6297448+  83  Linux /dev/hda2           785       977   1550272+   5  Extended /dev/hda5           785       801    136521   82  Linux swap /dev/hda6   *       802       977   1413688+   6  FAT16 Command (m for help): ------------------------------------------------- I can't boot off the FAT 16 partition and if I remove the Extended partition the Swap and FAT16 goes too! How can this be fixed without wiping the drive? Thanks in advance.