About partition table
Following is what I get as the output of fdisk -l. I have only one hard disk and have installed Windows XP and SUSE Linux. All these information can be clearly made with the following table.
Now I want to know why there is no sda3 and sda4? Why the partitions sda2 and sda5 starts at same cylender? Can anyone also recomment some good link where I can read some information about the partitioning? Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120033041920 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 3916 31455238+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 3917 14592 85754970 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 3917 7832 31455238+ b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda6 7833 10443 20972826 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda7 10444 14337 31278523+ 83 Linux /dev/sda8 14338 14592 2048256 82 Linux swap / Solaris Cheers. |
A disk can only have 4 primary partitions. If you want more than 4 which to me is pointless but anywho... you can do so using logical partitions. There are akin to psuedo-partitions. In your case, it looks like sda2 is a logical partition containing sda5-8. You could create more primary partitions which would become sda3 & sda4.
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In a nutshell:
Primary partitions have IDs 1-4. In order to create more then 4 partitions on of the primary partitions is an extended partition ( Ext'd ). An extended partition is a container for logical partitions. Logical partitions are then created within the extended partition and have an ID >=5. You do not need to create all 4 primary partitions before creating an extended with logicals. Just google for primary, extended and logical partitions. |
Thanks for the reply. I did some googling and got some valuable information. In one article I read that the boot loader can only load OSs located in primary partitions. In my case I have only one primary partition and linux is located in one of the logical partitions. I'm using GRUB as boot loader. I'm wondering how GRUB loads my linux although it's not in a primary partition?
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The only one of which you are likely to encounters is M$ofts. All Linux loaders don't suffer from this restriction. Unfortunately a lot of the articles on various web sites is very M$oft specific - and the authors don't even know that other options exist.. |
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Brain-Dead Loaders
It's actually worse than this. Given a system with 2 SATA drives and you want to install Win2K on sdb1, when you try this the installer wants to write files to sda1. Since the partition is "not writable" (no Bill, it's ext3 formatted) the installer recommends that you format sda1.
(Solution, connect the drive to the first SATA channel, install as normal, revert to previous setup and lilo will happily lie to Windows and get it to boot.) |
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Linux is SOOOO much easier though! It cares not whether it's in a primary or a logical, or a mixture, or scattered about various HDD's via LVM. SOOOOO much better! |
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