Question about partitioning

[Mears]

I can't really remember the specifics of partitioning. I'm kinda a little shady on the differences of primary vs extended so let me know if what I say is correct or not and fill me in on some of the important differences I may be missing:

1. A hard drive supports two primary partitions unless using partition magic and such
2. An OS must be installed to a primary partition

Lastly, when installing Linux, how do you guys break up your mount points into primary and extended or doesn't it really matter? I use a seperate /boot, /, and /home. One of these has to be an extended partition. I chose /home. Was that a good call or does it not make a difference?

 

[Koeppster]

DOS and Windows versions of fdisk are limited, I believe, to creating ONE primary partition. The rest must be secondary. I've never used PartitionMagic.

*nix versions of fdisk will quite happily create up to FOUR primary partitions. I wouldn't necessarily say that an OS needs to be installed to a primary partition, although that's certainly the case for Windows.

My Linux mount points are distributed between primary and extended because I use more mount points than the number of primary partitions available.

Here's my setup:

/dev/hda1 (primary): Windows 2000
/dev/hda2 (primary): /
/dev/hda3 (primary): /usr
/dev/hda4 (extended)
/dev/hda5: swap
/dev/hda6: /var
/dev/hda7: /home
/dev/hda8: /usr/local

There's really no right or wrong way to do this.

 

[corkyg]

1. A hard drive supports two primary partitions unless using partition magic and such

No. FDISK will create a primary DOS partition which can be the entire drive. Or, it can be less than the entire drive, and then you can create an Extended DOS partition. That in turn can have as many virtual drives as you care to set up. Partition Magic has to follow the same DOS rules. If you are setting up with another non-DOS system, then you go by its rules.

2. An OS must be installed to a primary partition

That is correct.