I am running Fedora 8 on a scsi drive and I want to create 4 primary partitions on my server:

/boot
/
/var
swap

I am using the GUI interface on Disk Druid to do this. I can create the three partitions with no problem, however when I get to swap, the interface automatically declates the last partition as an extended partition, even though I select the box "Force to be primary partition"


I understand the basic concept of primary and extended partitions, so it is my understanding that one could have a maximum of 4 primary paritions and then have the last primary partition contain a number of logical partitions.

Is it possible to just create 4 primary partitions without any extended/logical partitions?

Absolutely - dunno what's wrong with the tool, though - try {c,s,}fdisk.

fdisk seemed to create the last primary partition with no problem.

Thanks

Welcome.

Just as a note if you (or somebody else reading this) wonders: you do not need to have the partitions be primary if you're installing Linux on them. They can well be extended, and it's no problem. It's only Windows that wants to sit in a primary partition (and preferrably the first one, if I'm not mistaken); actually I don't get why nowadays we still have "primary" and "extended" partitions, as physically we could probably have only one sort of ("primary" if you like) partitions and live with it.

It's not just Windows - the BSDs (or at least FreeBSD <= 6) also demand a primary partition in which they make their 'slices'. As far as the continued existence of the distinction, it's still being backwardly compatible to hardware limitations, AFAIK - the structure of the MBR only has space for four. May be different for 64-bit machines and is different for completely different architectures. *shrug* Only thing about it that bothers me is that extended partitions start numbering at 5.