all gentoo partitions must be primary??

[gledi]

hi everybody. my problem is that i allready have 2 partitions set as Primary.

i can't make more than 4 primary on a hdd.

the first is Hiden partition (things of windows)
second is the xp He that i use 4 some programs
third is swap
fourth is going 2 be root

is necessesry 2 make the boot partition?

bootable is the windows partition and the boot 4 linux i cant make 2 bootable partitions.

if there is anyone who can help me is welcome.
_________________
p4 3200 laptop.
512,ati radeon64,
40gb
hdc1=hiden windows partition
hdc2=XP h.e
hdc3=boot (bootable)
hdc4=extended
hdc5=root
hdc6=swap

[Gherald]

after the 2 windows primary paritions, simply make a large extended partition

then you can make as many logical (not primary) partitions as you like

[taurus]

You can only have four primary partitions on one harddrive. If you want more than four partitions, then you have to use extended partition. There is no limited on number of partitions in extended create as many as you wish. So, create the first three partitions as primary. Make the fourth one as extended and in there, create as many logical partitions as you want...

[Geministorm]

Caveat:

SCSI/SATA drives are limited to 15 partitions per physical drive and IDE drives are limited to 63 partitions if I'm not mistaken.

4 Primary is a pre-existing limitation. An Extended partition counts as one of your Primary partitions, thus you can have 3 Primary partitions and 1 Extended partition max. That leaves room for 11/59 Logical partitions (partitions that reside within the Extended partition).

I don't think there is anything intrinsically superior to a Primary partition, so you can make 1 Primary, 1 Extended and 13/61 Logical if you wish.

/dev/hda1 - Primary
/dev/hda2 - Extended
*/dev/hda5 - Logical1
*/dev/hda6 - Logical2
*/dev/hda7 - Logical3
*/dev/hda8 - Logical4
*/dev/hda9 - Logical5
*/dev/hda10 - Logical6
*/dev/hda11 - Logical7
*/dev/hda12 - Logical8
*/dev/hda13 - Logical9
*/dev/hda14 - Logical10
*/dev/hda15 - Logical11
*/dev/hda16 - Logical12
*/dev/hda17 - Logical13

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong
_________________
Abit NF7-S (Realtek RTL8201, RTL8801b, ALC650, SiL3112a)
1GB (2x 512MB) DDR400, dual-channel
AMD 2500+ (Barton) XP (@10x200)
200GB Maxtor SATA
120GB Maxtor U-ATA
45GB IBM U-ATA
Plextor PX-712 DVD+/-RW
AOpen 16x DVD
OS: Gentoo/WinXP

[WTFman]

No you do not Have to have a boot partition. My gentoo boots up fine without one, the boot directory just goes on / . Just ignore the part about mounting/gentoo/boot. If you plan on using genkernel, it may complain about the lack of a boot partition, just ignore it, or manualy compile the kernel (which will compile much faster than Genkernel, besides if your hard ware has been detected than most everything you need should be set in the compile options anyways)
_________________
Occupation: Professional Slacker
Hobbies/Interests: Open Source Aficionado since 2005

[MickKi]

If you are going to have a swap, I would concur with your choice to put it on hda3 (primary) to allow it to run a bit faster. Then your hda4 becomes an extended partition (the size of the rest of the disk), hda5 your / (logical) and if you want to have a separate /boot partition then have this as the last logical partition.

That's not what the manual suggests. Having /boot as the first available partition (in this case /dev/hda3) would make linux boot a bit faster but swapping data a bit slower. It's a trade-off between what you would rather prefer running faster on your system and what you are running your system for; say, a 2G ram would make a swap partition almost redundant.

In answering the question in the title of your message - Gentoo can be installed either on primary or on logical partitions and can happily boot from either. Installing on primary means that it will run a little faster than installing on logical, however, for most users and applications this is of no particular importance.

This partitioning scheme would give you the freedom to add more logical partitions later on for e.g. data files, another OS or Linux distro and a VFAT formated partition to share data files with your Windoze OS.

On the other hand if you are definitely not going to need more partitions then just have / as the fourth primary partition and have the /boot directory in your /, just as it has already been suggested.
_________________
Regards,
Mick