Partiton names

gag · 10-18-2003, 06:43 PM

Hi all,
I'm trying to understand the way partitions are organised in Linux and I see many times hda1, hda2, hda5 etc. Whatever happend to hda3 for instance, why are the partitions not numbered contiguously?
Thanks

2damncommon · 10-18-2003, 06:50 PM

Edit: quatsch's post below is correct.

quatsch · 10-18-2003, 07:02 PM

any of the primary partitions can be extended. Since you can only have four primary partition, to have more, one of them can be made an extended partitons that contains further partitions. In your case, hda2 is the extended partition which contains hda5, hda6 and so on. The primary ones go from hda1 to hda4 If you don't have primary partitions 3 and 4, they of course don't show up.

gag · 10-19-2003, 06:42 AM

Thanks for the reply, I see now about primary partitions. But, and sorry if this seems dumb, why not use up the primary partitions, unless its because you don't know in advance if you will need more later, in which case you can't use up the primary ones...Hmm I think I just answered that one myself!!