On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 10:43:50AM -0400, Michael Klinosky wrote: > I just got another computer, and I'm stalled in the partitioning > department. I decided to forgo LVM, so I have some questions. > > Does it matter in which order I create the partitions? Like, should I > create /boot first? Some BIOSes cannot access beyond a given number of cylinders on a hard drive. Thus the files to be loaded by the BIOS should be contained entirely within the range up to that number. If you create /boot first, you will keep those BIOSes happy, and will not cause any problems for BIOSes that do not have that restriction. > > On the 'Add partition' window is a checkbox: 'Force to be a primary > partition'. What's this? (It's not mentioned in the Installation docs.) > Do any partitions need it? This has to do with the history of disk partitioning; it is a kludge and a bad hack. Even the terminology is atrocious. In short, there are four places in the partition table of the master boot record (the first sector of the hard drive). These are primary partitions. To add more partitions, primary partitions can be relabeled as extended partitions, which contain logical partitions. Under Mess-DOS, a given extended partition can have no more than four logical partitions. I don't know if any other OSs have this restriction. The logical partition table for each extended partition is contained in the first sector of the extended partition. You do not put file systems on extended partitions; they are containers for primary and logical partitions. Thus to add up to four logical partitions, you must sacrifice a primary partition. But you must have a primary partition to keep older BIOSes happy (and perhaps current ones; I don't follow BIOS development closely these days). So you can have up to 13 partitions in a Mess-DOS compliant hard drive. In any case, Linux' libata driver cannot recognize more than 15 primary and logical partitions, so that sets an upper limit. So the only partition you should force to be a primary is /boot, which should then become /dev/sda1. Let the disk partitioner allocate the rest between logical and primary. The article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_partition is pretty good, although it confuses things by conflating primary and logical partitions. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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