fdisk partition

blackzone · 08-21-2004, 09:37 PM

confused about partition.

Read a book and says MBR is limited to 4 primary partition, or 3 primary + 1 extended.

Does that mean 1 harddisk can only have a max of 4 primary partition. Or all harddisk together can only have a max of 4 primary partition.
==================================================

so that means if all my disk is primary, I can't have:
/dev/hda1
/dev/hda2
/dev/hda3
/dev/hdb1
/dev/hdb2
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and how do I check if my current disk is primary or extended?

ranger_nemo · 08-21-2004, 09:57 PM

Each disk can have four primary partitions. If you include logical partitions, each disk can have up to 15 partitions.

To check your disk, run "fdisk -l", and it will list the partitions you have.

michaelk · 08-21-2004, 10:24 PM

Actually an IDE can have up to 64 partitions, a SCSI drive is 16.

2damncommon · 08-21-2004, 11:53 PM

From my kernel boot log:

Code:

hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 hda10 hda11 hda12 hda13 hda14 hda15 hda16 hda17 hda18 >
hda2: <solaris: [s0] hda19 [s1] hda20 [s2] hda21 [s7] hda22 >
hda3: <bsd: hda23 hda24 hda25 hda26 hda27 >

Tuvok · 08-22-2004, 12:11 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by blackzone
and how do I check if my current disk is primary or extended?

fdisk -l /dev/hda

If you want to know about the size of current partition:
df -h

Crashed_Again · 08-22-2004, 02:43 AM

Yeah...the first three partitions are primary partitions. Then the fourth partition(/dev/hda4) is the extended partition. When you create the extended partition in fdisk you create it to use the rest of the disk. Then everything after that(/dev/hda5, /dev/hda6, etc.) will be a logical partition that is housed within the extended partition. So /dev/hda4 can't really be assigned to a specific directory since its not a useable partition.

michaelk · 08-22-2004, 07:47 AM

Actually, you can assign the extended partition filesystem type to any one of the 4 primary partitions. In fact, windows will use the 2nd primary parititon as extended when creating additional drives.