On 2009/12/09 21:18 (GMT+1030) Rodney Baker composed:
On Wed, 9 Dec 2009 21:09:32 jdd-gmane wrote:
Le 09/12/2009 11:16, Rodney Baker a écrit :
booting from a primary partition or booting from an extended partition (which, remember, is a virtual partition with a partition number above 5).
no. partitions with number 5 and up are logical partitions. extended is the container for logicals and can be 1-4 (it's a primary one)
Right you are. I knew that it didn't look quite right when I typed it and I was going to change it, but I just couldn't put my finger on it.
To be perfectly clear, all HD partitions are virtual, involving nothing more physical than the orientation of the magnetic bits in the bytes of each partition table entry, and nothing physical whatsoever within filesystem space. Virtual is here just a synonym for logical. Thus, _all_ partitions on a HD are logical. The significant difference between what we call primary and what we call logical is quite simply the location of the partition "table" entry that defines every partition's logical start and end. There is nothing different about the filesystems that get installed on them after partitioning is set that has anything to do with partitioning. The reason for distinguishing between "primary" and "logical" partitions applies entirely to the boot process. Once booted, a partition is a partition is a partition, all of which are just labels for the locations of discrete filesystems - except for the extended, which never contains a filesystem and is merely a pointer to the location of the next sector containing partition table data, irrelevant post-boot to anything except boot loader reconfiguration. -- " We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion." John Adams, 2nd US President Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org