Primary or Logical partition ?
 

hi people..

I just confused about which one to create,
and, why is the difference between them ?

why is that only 4 primary partitions can
be created ??

why is the best ?

edward.

Here are some links to chew on:

http://www.mobiledyne.com/pub/pcfdisk.html
http://people.mw.mediaone.net/rthamp...rtitioning.htm
http://www.blueskyinnovations.com/pdisk.html
http://www.yale.edu/pclt/BOOT/PARTITIO.HTM

quick summary
 

i bet that the above links are very useful but just quickly

primary partitions are the main sort of partition that you make. There is a limit to how many of these you can make (which as you said is four). To get more partitions than this you need to make logical partitions. These are basically a partition within a partition (I think that they may sometimes be referred to as extended partitions). They tend not to get used much since computers nowadays can get around the 2GB hard drive limit (which meant you had to split larger drives into partitions) and few people need to have more than 4 partitions.

If you do need more it makes little difference since logical partitions should be handled seamlessly (you won;'t really notice i don;t think)

HTH

Alex

primary or logical and /boot
 

For safety, your Linux /boot partition should be 16-32 MB, and it must be within the first 1023 cylinders or 8 GBytes of your hard drive. It does not matter whether /boot is a primary or logical partition.

You can get around the above restriction, but following the above rule will make life easier. The other Linux partitions you need to create do not care whether they are primary or logical partitions either.

You can subdivide a primary partition into many logical partitions. If you are running a dual-boot system with Linux and Windows, I believe the Windows operating system needs to be a primary partition. Other Windows partitions do not have to be a primary partition.

Thanks for the information. It means we can choose any partition type i.e. either primary or logical.

You can use GPT, it has no such limit. Some operating systems refuse to boot if you have BIOS boot and GPT disk. Linux generally boots, but I seem to remember reading somewhere Red Hat does not like this combination.
GPT also has no 2 TiB limit.

Note: until that post today, this thread had been dormant 14 years.

Strange how that can happen sometimes.

When the original logical architecture for disk drives (the "MBR") was designed, four slots were reserved for a partition table. These are the "primary" partitions.

So ... when you need more than four partitions on a drive, what's a computer to do? Why, merely define a special primary-partition type, which says that it begins with its own extended, or overflow, partition-table. Now, the drive can have as many partitions as you like. These are the "logical" partitions.

Functionally, they are the same. They all map to an inclusive range of cylinders. It's merely a question of exactly where Linux has to go to find them: does it require one disk-read, or two.