[Leaplist] Partitioning Gurus?

[Chris]

Fred Moore wrote:

>On Saturday 10 February 2007 12:05, Chris wrote:
>  
>
>>pberry2 at cfl.rr.com wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Chris wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Urrgh - I talked a friend into installing Linux, for which he
>>>>volunteered his new Dell laptop, as long as he could dual-boot.
>>>>So I fired up GPartEd, all ready to slice and dice, and saw this:
>>>>
>>>>/dev/sda1   fat16   47.03 MiB
>>>>/dev/sda2   ntfs    104.99 GiB
>>>>unallocated            7.84 MiB
>>>>/dev/sda3   extended   2.00 GiB
>>>>  /dev/sda5  fat32   2.00 GiB
>>>>/dev/sda4   fat 32   4.74 GiB       Apparently, Dell hase all kinds
>>>>of really wonderful stuff that
>>>>just has to chew up the available partitions. Thank you, Dell.
>>>>I don't know what these are there for - I suspect the fat16
>>>>is for some Dell Diag utility - and one of the fat32s is
>>>>probably for Ghost? - No clue.
>>>>
>>>>Any suggestions that won't kill his existing functionality?
>>>>While I'm in there, I'd like to sneak in a fat32 partition for
>>>>files he'll use in both systems.
>>>>
>>>>Cheers,
>>>>
>>>>Chris
>>>>_____________
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Chris:
>>>
>>>You are confused.  sda1/  plus sda2/ plus sda4/ are primary
>>>partitions.  then,  they made extended sda3/ (logical)  2.0Gb and put
>>>sda5/ (logical) there.
>>>      
>>>
>>Yes, I am very confused. I thought SDA3 was an extended partition,
>>but you show it as (logical). My understanding was that you were
>>allowed four primary partitions, because there are only four
>>partition entries in the MBR - and up to three of those partitions
>>can be Extended partitions, which can contain multiple logical
>>partitions.
>>http://www.minix3.org/doc/partitions.html
>>
>>    
>>
>>>When you resize sda2/ down to like 40Gb,  you will get an extended
>>>partition sda6/ through sda?? out of it for as many as you like, up to
>>>the 64Gb that is made, in this example, to be free for use.  The 7.84
>>>Gb unallocated space could be made into a FAT32 extended logical
>>>partition for file transfers!
>>>      
>>>
>>OK, I'll give it a shot, but it looks like Dell has used all four
>>partition entries in the MBR, so I'm not sure where there's
>>room for any more extended partitions??? Did you meant that
>>I would be able to create more logical partitions in the SDA3
>>extended partition?
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I thought Dell did better work than all that so I think this has been
>>>fiddled with since it was built.
>>>      
>>>
>>Not too fiddled with - it's brand new. I tried this Monday last week,
>>then decided to hold off when I found all the partitions - Wednesday
>>last week, his HD died. Dell, to their credit had it replaced with
>>a pre-imaged drive for his laptop within three days. And the pre-imaged
>>drive is exactly the same.
>>
>>Dell has apparently gotten "cute" lately:
>>http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm
>>I'm still trying to sort through this page, but it looks
>>similar to my friend's layout.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>Chris
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Leaplist mailing list
>>Leaplist at leap-cf.org
>>http://lists.leap-cf.org/mailman/listinfo/leaplist
>>    
>>
>
>
>
>and here I thought it as:
>sda, sdb, sdc, sdd were drives (scsi)
>
>  
>
I believe this is true - each representing a physical device in
the /dev tree. Of course, I also believe it is true that all of our
world leaders have been secretly replaced by alien reptiles,
so who knows.

>while sda1, sda2, sda3, etc.. up to 16
>were logical partitions on each drive.. 
>
>  
>
I am thinking that sda1-4 are primary partitions and that
sda5-n (don't know how many is possible) are the logical
partitions. As far as I understand, up to three primary
partitions may be "extended" partitions, acting as containers
for multiple "logical" partitions.

Of course, just to kink things up the goodells link above seems to
indicate that there is now the possibility of magic "hidden" partitions
that can be swapped in and out of the MBR as needed - yikes!!!

>and I always understood that 4 primary partitions could exist.. 
>each of the 4 could be extended partitions allowing each to have 16 logical 
>partitions.. 
>
>  
>
I think that only three of the primary partitions can be extended.
But I have absolutely zero idea as to how many logical partitions
can exist in each extended partition - or if there is an absolute
upper number of logical partitions for the drive.

>guess I missed something, but this has always worked for me... Fred
>
>  
>
Don't break it if'n it ain't fixed... errr, something like that.

Cheers,

Chris