quick: does a partition have to be "primary" to boot?

[dpopiz]

can you boot off an "extended logical" partition?

 

[phonemonkey]

I think you can if you've got win 2k/xp pro. You can't with ME or 9x

 

[jjyiz28]

no, must be active, and extended logical cannot be made active

edit: hmm.. maybe you can with xp/2k.
edit2: take it back, i dont' think you can "boot" from it, doesn't mean you can't set up an OS on a logical partition though. i may be wrong.

 

[dpopiz]

thanks

 

[NogginBoink]

Must be primary. Period.

The BIOS reads the partition table in the MBR and looks for a bootable partition. Extended partitions are not defined in the MBR and are therefore not bootable.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: NogginBoink
Must be primary. Period.

The BIOS reads the partition table in the MBR and looks for a bootable partition. Extended partitions are not defined in the MBR and are therefore not bootable.

"Period" only if you're talking about Windows. Linux and BSD don't care about bootable/active partitions - they just load the physical location of the kernel or the next step of the loader into the MBR. Whether that location is in a primary or logical partition makes no difference.

I wouldn't nitpick except that the title made no mention of OS...

 

[Zelmo3]

jjyiz28 just about had it spelled out in his edit #2. The OS can be installed anywhere. The BIOS just starts the bootloader that is installed on the MBR of the boot drive, and then the bootloader can boot an OS from any disk.
For example, when I installed Linux on my primary IDE drive and WinXP on my PCI RAID, Windows wrote a bootloader to the IDE drive's MBR telling it where WinXP was installed. Linux also installed GRUB to the same drive's MBR, which let me pick whether to boot Linux from that disk or Windows from wherever XP's bootloader said it was.

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on the bootloader. With the 'basic' MS/DOS MBR, yes it can only boot active primary partitions. With something more elaborate (XOSL, GRUB, etc) it doesn't matter.