howmany partitions per disk possible?

[Tony Arnold]

On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 08:08 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
> · Tony Arnold <tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk>:

> > I mean there are no primary partitions on the disk at all!
> 
> That's impossible.

It's impossible if the disk is to be used for anything:-)

> > The whole 
> > disk is taken up by a extended partition hda4,
> 
> See? There's your primary partition - hda4.

OK, so an extended partition is also a primary partition. I was just
trying to show that there were no other primary partitions.

> > which contains two 
> > logical partitions, hda5 and hda6. Seems a bit strange to me.
> 
> Not really. Why does it seem strange to you? It seems to be 
> very normal to me.

Really? Maybe it's me! If I partition a disk, I tend to create the first
three primaries and the fourth as an extended and then put logicals
inside the extended. That seems the logical way to proceed. But as
others have pointed out, Linux works however the partitions are set up.

> > The system was working fine and I know that Linux doesn't care too much,
> > but I did find it strange that neither gparted no qtparted would shrink
> > hda6 which is of type LVM. Maybe it's the partition type, or because it
> > cannot identify the file system,
> 
> I bet that this is the reason. But it's actually *GOOD* that those
> tools didn't shrink the partition, as it would have destroyed the
> VG.

Which is why I was a little nervous about changing the partition with
fdisk, but as fdisk doesn't touch the file system maybe it is safer in
this case?

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
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