One Final Question On Partitions - Sorry!

Jean-François Gagnon Laporte kioshen at gmail.com
Wed Jan 24 14:07:26 UTC 2007


On 1/24/07, Darren Zawislak <hi.darren at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>

> My questions are: How are people creating more than 4 partitions? The
> obvious answer to me is by using a extended partition. But can I only
> have one extended partition with many logical partitions? I have played
> with Partition Manager and Gpart, with several combinations, including
> one suggestion of what happens when you put the swap position in the
> first position ahead of the root, and ahead of Windows (It worked just
> fine).
>
You can have only 4 primary partitions in a DOS format. Since an
extended partition counts as a primary that means that you can either
have :

- 4 primary
- At least one but no more than 3 primary and an extended partition
that includes a bunch of logical partitions. As for the limit of
logical inside ... it's way more than you ever need except if you are
an overzealous sysadmin ... and if you are you already use LVM :)

> My goal (and please don't hesitate to comment either positively or
> negatively) is to create the following:
> partition 1 - Linux swap 2 GB
> partition 2 - XP OS & program files 40 GB
> partition 3 - NTFS data 160 GB
> partition 4 - Linux root - 40 GB (I know, way to large. I can always
> shrink it)
> partition 5 - /home - 158 GB - I like the separate home partition as
> suggested for protecting the data during upgrades. Good suggestion from
> the e-mails.
>
Swap doesn't have to be right in front. It can be anywhere in the disk
IIRC so it's a better practice to put it in the extended partition as
a logical partition. Moreover, put your data partitions in the
extended one since they can be placed anywhere and an OS doesn't care
where they are. Bottom line is that it's more flexible that way and
leaves more primary partition available.

As for the order of the root partitions of both OS it doesn't really
matter. I put one linux in front because that's my primary OS but
either way it's fine.

I do other stuffs like have a separate /boot that contains all of my
kernels (custom builds or otherwise) for all of my linux that I have
installed but it's not a requirement.

So basically that gives you :

sda1 XP 40G
sda2 Linux 40G
sda5 Swap 2G
sda6 NTFS 160G
sda7 /home 158G

<snip>
> Darren

Regards,

JF




More information about the ubuntu-ca mailing list