can anyone help me understand what the point/benefit of the regular primary partition is (why have one at all) when you can just make the entire HD an extended partition and then have as many logical partitions as you want within that... no 4 partition limit.

i ask because i seem to get this feeling that a "good" partition scheme is one of those things every kid hopes santa will bring for x-mas, but i'm having a hard time figuring out what "good" would constitute.

in my case, i just installed a 250G drive, and i'd like to take the old 20G out of the box, so then i'll have just the one HD in there. what i'd like is to have a working slack install that is my usual install, but then be able to play around (since there's a metric crap-load of space on the drive) with other installations like gentoo, lfs, etc. while keeping some large area constant for just storing files and other trash. probably setting up a server and all that other fun stuff is in the future for this box too, but not anytime soon.

so, without really wanting to decide _right now_ how i'd like to use up ALL 250Gigs of space, i'd like a scheme that allows for maximum flexibility.

seems to me that making the entire drive an extended partition allows for this, but it also seems that there must be some reason not to (unfortunately, i haven't really been able to understand why, despite looking for the info for the past 3 days).

how wrong am i?

The way its designed along with the MBR of a hard drive, you need one primary partition. Logical drives are just a primary partition that are split up. If you want many many partitions, I'd suggest creating one partition and the rest logical. If you created 4 primary partitions, that's it, your done with partitions. You can have 3 primary and then one extended where you can have many logical partitions.

If your setting up Linux, your going to need a swap space anyways which can be shared with all OS's if you desire. I'd suggest creating a Primary partition for the first OS, a swap which can be primary and then the rest as Logical.

Maybe this link will help explain hard drive structuring.. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/...titions-c.html