Physical and logical partitions are equally secure (or unsecure if you fiddle with things you ought not to).
You can have four physical, two of those ought to be root and swap and a third can be whatever you want it to be (say, /var).
After than, define the fourth as logical, give it as much space as you want, then add additional logical partitions until you run out of disk.
I do things in multiple partitions:
Code:
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 15G 7.3G 6.7G 53% /
/dev/sda3 19G 3.7G 14G 22% /home
/dev/sda5 19G 3.9G 14G 22% /usr/local
/dev/sda6 19G 1.2G 17G 7% /opt
/dev/sda7 19G 304M 18G 2% /var/lib/mysql
/dev/sda8 92G 37G 51G 42% /var/lib/virtual
/dev/sda9 92G 9.0G 79G 11% /spares
/dev/sda10 173G 220M 164G 1% /var/lib/psql
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
These fit my needs but may not fit yours -- they're only for talking purposes.
Looking at the partition map (with
cfdisk /dev/sda:
Code:
cfdisk (util-linux 2.19)
Disk Drive: /dev/sda
Size: 500107862016 bytes, 500.1 GB
Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 60801
Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sda1 Primary ext4 15998.17
sda2 Primary swap 15998.17
sda3 Primary ext4 20003.89
sda5 Logical ext4 20003.89
sda6 Logical ext4 20003.89
sda7 Logical ext4 20003.89
sda8 Logical ext4 100002.96
sda9 Logical ext4 100002.96
sda10 Logical ext4 188087.48
Logical Free Space 2.62 *
The reason I do this is that during installation (at least in Slackware) as I define or allocate partitions to file systems (that get added to
/etc/fstab) I can choose to not format them. Thus, the content remains intact, the partition is in
/etc/fstab, they are mounted at boot and I don't have to back up huge files onto media (or a server, which is what I normally do just-in-case anyway).
For example,
/var/lib/virtual contains (at present) two virtual machines,
XP and
Win7 which add up to 37G -- lots of stuff to back up. Similarly,
/opt contains stuff I don't want to loose (and don't want to reload either),
/usr/local contains all non-distribution software I've added (ditto) and
/var/lib/mysql has some important data bases I don't want to loose or have to reconstruct from a lot of complicate stuff.
For all practical purposes, logical partitions are identical to physical ones (and, yeah, they're physical disk space). The limits of four physical partitions are hold-overs from the bad old days and you just have to live with 'em (for now -- there are ways around that, but it's hardly worth the effort).
Hope this helps some.
