primary or logical partition?

mayday147 · Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2005 7:35 pm Post subject: primary or logical partition?

Which on is the best to use, when creating partition slices with fdisk, in order to install linux on them?
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gentoo.ro

eelke · Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2005 7:55 pm Post subject:

It doesn't make any difference for linux. However be advised that you can only create 4 primary partitions (on a single disk). If you need more you have to create an extended partition with logical partitions.

sundialsvc4 · Guru Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 436

The partition-table is stored in the Master Boot Record (MBR), and there are only four slots there. So the solution that was settled-upon is this: the last partition may be called an extended partition, and at the start of that area there's another partition-table. We do this specifically so that we can now define so-called logical partitions within that space. The four-slot limit in the MBR has thus been neatly bypassed.

When the dust finally settles, though, "a partition is a partition is a partition." If you need more than four on a single disk, "this is how you do it."