Creating Extended Linux Partition

[Basie]

I have a hard drive which has a Primary partition ( WinMe ) and Extended Partition with four Logical Drives. XP being on one of them. I have about 18G freespace and was wondering if I could create another
Linux Extended Partition with logical drives? If so, what would I use. Linux's fdisk, Parted or qparted? Most of the distros I tried do not have the option to create a extended partition. Just Primaries.

 

[drag]

I think your a bit confused on your terminology (it could be me, but I am confused a bit about what your saying),

You can have a MAXIMUM of 1 extended partition on any harddrive.

You can have a maximum 4 primary partitions. These are "real" partitions, as dictated by the limitations of the ancient 286 bios.

Generally you make 3 partitions primary, and then make a 4th primary partition be the "extended" partition.

From that extended partition you divide it up into logical (pretend, sortof) partitions. That way you can get past the limitations of the x86 bios.

Now you can have as many logical partitions as you wish. There is a limit somewere, but I think it's fairly high.

However you CAN'T have 2 extended partitions. Only one.

So if you have a setup like this:
120gig harddrive:
4 partitions:
1=20gigs
2=20gigs
3=20gigs
4=40gigs,

And you make partition 4 the extended partition so then you have
5(logical)=20gigs
6(logical)=20gigs

So you have a total disk space aviable of 100gig divided up into 5 accessable "drives". Which are not drives, but Windows calls them drives incorrectly for some perverse reason.

Drives = physical devices
partitions = what harddrives are divided up into.

That means you now have 20gigs that you can't ever use for anything. You used up your primary drives, and did not alocate it to your extended partition. If you did then you would still have that 20gigs aviable to partition into more logical drives.

So no, you can not alocate that extra space to a extended partition since you can never have more then one extended partition. I think that you can probably alocate it to a primary partition (since you have 2 extra that you seem not be using), but it'll mess up the drive numbering sceme. Linux can deal with that, but it's confusing and I don't know if windows can deal with it.

Either way, you can try.

However if I am confused and you do indeed have that space alocated to the extended partition, and haven't just gotten around to making it into a logical partition, then yes, you can install linux into a logical partition.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Originally posted by: Basie
Most of the distros I tried do not have the option to create a extended partition. Just Primaries.

That is due to the fact that you have already created the one extended partition that is possible. You shouldn't have any problem creating new partitions with the remaining space, though.

EDIT >> You will have to resize your extended partition to use the remaining space before you can create any new logical partitions.

 

[Basie]

I can see my big mistake was to create one primary then an extended partition just using half my drive space.
Now I have 18G that I can probably install two Linux Distros on using up the two remaining primaries. Somehow I thought that a Linux extended partition could be created along with a Dos extended partition but I see now that
is not possible. Can I resize my Dos extended partition with a Linux partition utility? I probably could use Ranesh Partition Manager. Linux makes you think in a way that Windows doesnt. I have used Fdisk many times and thougt I knew all about partitioning. Duh. Thanks again for all your input.

 

[drag]

Some installers include a partition resizing utility. Mandrake does I think. Probably more.

Knoppix is a "live linux cd", which means that the OS runs completely from the CD without having to install anything on any harddrive. It includes a partiting utility called qtparted (which is probably what is used in the installers.) (parted is the command line version)

Qtparted should be able to resize the extended partition.

 

[Basie]

Thanks Drag for coming to my rescue again. I do have a Knoppix CD and will give it a try. Also have Mandrake. For awhile there I was downloading every Distro I could find and playing with them. I wore out
my old burner and got a Liteon 52. At least I learned something this past week. Now if I can get my 65 year old brain to remember most of it.