<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#33cc00"> Tony Arnold wrote: <blockquote cite="mid1157990466.20615.21.camel@localhost.localdomain" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 15:53 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">In the mean time, I've taken the coward's way out and re-installed. Given my partitions were peculiar anyway (one extended containing two logicals, no primaries at all), it was probably the right thing to do. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">Hm? What's strange about this? Extended partitions always only contain logical partitions. They cannot, by definition, contain anything else. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> I mean there are no primary partitions on the disk at all! The whole disk is taken up by a extended partition hda4, which contains two logical partitions, hda5 and hda6. Seems a bit strange to me. 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, or maybe it's because its a logical partition! I was just trying all the possibilities. Regards, Tony. </pre> </blockquote> Actually there is a primary partition - it's called the extended partition. As I understand it: You can have up to four (4) primary partitions. One of these may be an "Extended" partition, and is always designated as the fourth Primary partition (hdX4). Subsequent logical partitions are created in the Extended Partition, up to a total of twelve (12) logical partitions. While this seems to total 16 partitions, you lose one to the extended partition, so the total is 15. If the first (or only) primary partition is defined as an extended partition, it show up as the fourth partition, even though there are no partitions 1-3. I one were to go back and define them after the extended partition was defined, they would appear as 1, 2, and 3. Logical partitions always start from 5 and work up. On my current 250 GB sata drive, I have partitions 1 - 11; 1=/boot, 2=swap, 3=Ubuntu, 4=extended partition, 5-11 data partitions of ~ 20 - 25 GB each. I hope this helps. Kim </body> </html>