Partition fundamental questions
 

This must be a very basic question. Excuse me to repeat asking, although I've read many posts. I need some clarifications to be very sure.

Question 1) In M$ Windows world, it only recognises a maximum of 4 primary partitions for each IDE drive. Alternately I can define 3 primary partitions plus 1 extended partition, M$ will recognise them. Is this true?

Question 2) The above stated limitation remains unchanged when I am installing Linux onto the disk. Is that true? (In other words, I can only define at most 3 primary partitions plus one extended partition.)

Question 3) This is my existing partition map of my 80 gb drive:
a) primary dos partition - 4 gb with installed with Windows 98
b) extended partition - 40 gb. All its space are already 'occupied' for use under Windows. Although I do divided the 40 gb into 4 chunks. 2 chunks is FAT32 and 2 chunks are NTFS.
c) primary parttions - 10 gb used by WindowsXP.
d) 26 GB unallocated.

I want to add 4 partitions in order to install one Linux distro, do I need to re-organize my hard disk? The 4 partitions (total ~15 gb) I need would be:
/ for root (10 gb)
/boot (100 mb)
/swap (1 gb)
/home (5 gb)

Because there is still ~10 gb unused capacity, I want to keep it aside for future use - for instance, in case I need to try a different favor of Linux. Please outline briefly the ways to allocate space for these 4 new partitions.

you can do all of those just under root and / if you want

but just remember, you get 4 primary and one extended with your other partitions, but all fat32 and linux partitions must be primary instead of logical

1. Yes
2. Yes. Physically at least. There is something called "Logical Volume Manager" (LVM)
on Linux, but is is quite complicated and probably not for a newbie.
3. If you want partitions as described, then yes, you have to re-organize.

On the extended partition you can have many logical partitions (at least 16),
so the trick is to create a really big extended partition with many logical partitions.

And linux partitions can all be logical, including /boot (if you are using GRUB) and
swap. They do not have to be primary as stated in the reply above.

Regards,
L Ekman

Actually you can have up to 64 partitions on IDE but only 16 on SCSI.
Will you have to reorganize? It appears to be the case but I can't tell for sure unless I know how the drive is exactly partitioned. You will need to resize the extended partition to include the unallocated space.

If the drive is partitioned as:
Primary partition 1
primary partition 2 - extended
primary partition 3
Then you will need to move the primary partition to the end of the disk and then resize the extended partition.

Thanks. Yes, I think the above is my existing drive map. I hope what you wrote "primary partition 2 - extended" means the same term ("extended partition") used by Win2000 or WinXP. My understanding in the way to distinguish an extended from primary is that: an extended allows me to define multiple logical drives under Window/dos environment, while this is not possible with "primary".

It is good to hear all Linux partitions may be logical within the extended partition.

More clarifications to be exactly sure, please.
1) I assume I can mix "Windows type partitions" (partitions with FS of type FAT32 or NTFS) with Linux type partitions within the "extended" one. Is it true that I normally need to define all logical drives for use by Win/dos first, then after that, define more partitions for use by Linux in the extended?

2) Apparently I should have made a much larger "extended" in the very beginning. So now I need to increase the size of the existing "extended" from 50 gb to 55 GB. I usually borrow another disk drive to copy everything out and do the re-partitioning using Windows fdisk command. This is because I don't have any partitioning tools such as "partiition magic". Is there a free-to-use one to make my above task easier (I mean no need to move data to another hard disk)?

Thanks

parted is a free linux utility for resizing partitions.

I'm probably splitting hairs. A partition has an identifier assocatied with it. An extended partition is a primary that has an identifier of extended type and in your case it is 0x0F. Since you define a primary partition as extended you can create logicals that reside in that space.

Primary partitions have a number from 1-4. Logicals are assigned from 5 and up. Your first statement was correct there are only 4 primary partitions and one of the primaries can be identified as an extended.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...artitions.html

You can mix partition types in any order.

I am still not very clear. Do you mean "parted" is a software available to me during installation?

It appears I need to re-organize my hard disk in order to install Linux, because I had failed to partition my hard disk correctly in the first place. To re-define my hard disk layout, I have a tools called "parted" that helps me to avoid copying things out - parted just re-sizes partitions.

The tools is good to avoiding copying out from hard disk and restore it back again. But is "parted" a Linux utility? How could I have access to it BEFORE my Linux is ever installed?

No it isn't usually available during installation. I do not know what RH has for its disk utilities on its installer.

parted is a linux utility. Its similar to windows Partition Magic. You can download and run it from a CD or floppy disk.