partitioning?

sam111

Solid State Member
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I recently bought a new 1 TB HDD.
I used gpart to partition the drive into about 15 logical partitions inside one extended partition. Then I installed around 15 OS on each logical partition of the extended partition.
When I boot with grub they all boot and work fine so I have a 15 bootable OS on one HDD.

What I don't fully understand is what the different partitions are. (i.e what the differences in using one or the other ...etc)

What I know is extended partition is a container for logical partitions.
logical partitions contain the actual filesystem , os , data ,...etc
The mbr (first sector of the HDD) holds the partition table which has room for only 4 different partitions

But what is the difference between a primary partition and an extended partition ?
(is it that an extended partition is just a special primary partition that allows you to contain more partitions then 4 , is that all it is )

Is there any max for the amount of logical partitions in a extended partition or can you have as many as you want?
 
i am not an expert on that subject but...
the difference between the primary and the extended partitino is realy only what partition it will check first.
in obaration systems like DOS and older windows OS'es you needed to have that OS installed on the primary in order to boot from it.
but newer oparation systems it is no longer nessasary. so the difference today is realy just witch partition it checks first. noting you need to worry about.

you can have as many partitions as letters in the english alfabet. exept A and B. those are old Floby drives. it sux that you cant use them for partitions.
i wonder why?????
 
you can have as many partitions as letters in the english alfabet. exept A and B. those are old Floby drives. it sux that you cant use them for partitions.

In theory you could use A , B for drives it is just that the windows os's reserve these labels by default for the floppy 1 , 2 drives.
If you where using linux you could assign them a or b or what every you want (i.e mount /dev/hda1 /media/A ) ,...etc
The labels A , B , C ,..etc are just default volume labels you can change them in windows as well. (think of the volume labels as the linux equivalent of mount points they are really the same microsoft has mountvol :) )

I am also wondering is their any limit on the amount of extended partitions you can create on a harddisk?
For primary partitions it is 4.

I also think that you are wrong in saying that their is not a limit on the number of logical partitions in a extended partitions because after 15 or so I tried to create another logical inside my extended and gpart is throwing errors. So their must be a limit on these as well.

Curious if anybody knows a little more about partitioning.
And what gets written out to the disk when creating a primary or extended partition.
I believe it is just in the mbr partition table but if somebody knows for sure can they please explain.
 
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