On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Ryan wrote: > Windows 9x/ME gets a bit pissed off if you use more then one primary > partition on a hard drive, but can live with it if you use BootMagic, but > won't boot with LILO.
I should clarify what Ryan said. Windows gets very very angry if you have more than one *Windows* primary partition. As matter of a fact, if you create partitions under Windows it won't let you create more than one Windows primary partition. Windows 9x will ignore any non-Windows partitions, but Windows 2000 will get very angry if you have any non-Windows partition when you install Windows 2000. But it sounds like you already have Windows 2000 installed so there's no problem of that. The point of primary/extended partitions is more historical than anything else. Due to an overlooked foresight, you can only have up to four primary partitions. Extended partitions are used to create more partitions (up to 16 more, I think), but zero or more extended partitions will eat up exactly one primary partition. What I do is use one primary partition for Windows, one primary for Linux, and any extras go into the extended partition. This setup takes up three primary partitions (1 Windows, 1 Linux, 1 Extended). Since this leaves one extra primary partition, I will sometimes make an extra partition of some random type (say, MINIX) and good size, in case I want to install some other OS in the future to try out (MINIX, OS/2, BeOS, etc.) I like this setup because I get to install LILO on the primary Linux partition rather than the master boot record (MBR); Windows occasionally overwrites the MBR (ex, when you reinstall Windows, which you have to do from time to time) so LILO stays safe. But to install LILO on the primary Linux partition, you'll need to set the primary Linux partition as the active partition, otherwise Windows will boot without first going to LILO. -Mark -- Mark K. Kim http://www.cbreak.org/mark/ PGP key available upon request.
