Unexpected "W95 Ext'd (LBA)" partition
 

Hi,

I'm a decent computer guy who is also a Linux newbie.
I installed FC4 on a pc with 3 NTFS partitions.
I formated the first partition to ext3 (I don't really know what that is) and installed linux on it. I kept the others the way they are in case I chickened out and wanted to bring windows back.
Fortunately, linux is doing quite well and I want to format the other two partitions.

Here's my questions: When I do a "fdisk -l /dev/hda," I see 4 partitions:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1275 10241406 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 1276 7295 48355650 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 1276 2550 10241406 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda6 2551 7295 38114181 7 HPFS/NTFS

The 1st and last 2 are as I expect, but what's the second one?
Also, is there a way to change the number of hda5 and hda6 so they become hda2 and hda3? This isn't all that important, but it bugs the neat freak in me.

Thanks,
Hawk

Look at the range of the Extended partition. An extended partition is just a container for other partitions... and the hda5/hda6 is just a naming scheme, I don't think you can change that.

Thanks!
One more Q though: Can I remove that thing? (Should I remove that thing?)
What happens if I format one partition?
What does it do?

When hard drives first appeared in PCs one could only create 4 partitions. As drives increased in size this became a limitation. To overcome this limitation, the extended partition and logical partition were created. Now the orginal partitions are known as primary partitions and have an ID of 1-4. Any drive id >=5 is a logical partition.

BTW the max partitions that linux can handle is 64. If you remove the extended partition you will also remove hda5 and hda6. You do not need an extended partition if you keep the number of partitions to 4 or less. However if you ever decide to install another OS then you will probably need to reformat the drive.

Formating a partition will not affect any other partition.