[SLE] Partitioning in SuSE (or in general)
Hi, I want to have 2 SuSE installations on my harddrive, and use Grub to decide which to boot. My hd is currently partitioned into 2 windows partitions, a swap, and Reiser partition with /. I shrunk the Reiser partition (I have good backups, so I thought I could risk this), and tried to create a new partition. Apparently the limit of primary partitions is 4, and I already have 4. Same for extended partitions, and logical partitions can only be in extended partitions, and I have no extended partitions. At least, this is what the error message says. My problem is, I really don't know when to use primary partitions, extended partitions or logical partitions, so I have no idea how to go about solving this. Any advice on how to do this, but also more general information on what each type of partition is good for, is what I am looking for. Thanks Marius -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com
On Saturday 01 July 2006 11:56, Marius Roets wrote:
My problem is, I really don't know when to use primary partitions, extended partitions or logical partitions, so I have no idea how to go about solving this. Any advice on how to do this, but also more general information on what each type of partition is good for, is what I am looking for.
Here's the deal on primary vs logical and it's pretty easy. 1) You can have only 4 primary partitions on a single drive. 2) If you want logical partitions, one of the primary partitions must be define as a 'logical' extended partition. This leaves you with only 3 possible primary partitions plus the logical 'area'. 3) Within the logical area, you can have up to 255 logical partitions. 4) Linux doesn't really care whether you use logical or primary partitions so if a drive is only to be used for Linux, you might as will make all partitions logical. (1 primary as a logical extended partition which will contain all the rest of the partitions) 5) In linux, primary partitions are number 1 thru 4. Logical partitions start at 5 and go on up. Thus you can easily tell which is a logical and which is a primary. 6) Windows used to require a primary C: partition.... some versions still do but I think XP can be placed anywhere but will want a small boot partition that is primary. I might be wrong on this. DOS still requires that it be booted from a primary partition. That's about it in a nutshell..... -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com
Marius Roets wrote:
My problem is, I really don't know when to use primary partitions, extended partitions or logical partitions, so I have no idea how to go about solving this. Any advice on how to do this, but also more general information on what each type of partition is good for, is what I am looking for.
Originally, there was only primary partitions, to a maximum of 4. This meant you could not have more than 4 partitions total. To get around this, the extended partition was created, where you could have several more "logical" partitions. The extended partitiion uses one of the 4 primary partitions. Linux doesn't care which type of partition it's installed in, though Windows insists on being in a primary partition. So for Linux installs, with less than 5 partitions, it doesn't matter what partition types you use.
participants (3)
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Bruce Marshall
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James Knott
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Marius Roets