[GLLUG] Hard Disk Partitions

[Ben Pfaff]

"Chick Tower" <c.tower@express56.com> writes:

> I'm a Linux newbie.  I haven't even installed any Linux distro yet, although
> I've been doing a lot of reading.  One thing I just read was a Smart
> Computing article about setting up a hard disk for multiple OSs, which said
> there can be at most four active partitions or three active and one
> extended.

This is true.  The extended partition can contain several
partitions, though.

> I've seen several recommendations for partitioning a Linux
> system, and they frequently have more than four partitions.

For server systems, I generally agree with those recommendations.
But for my own desktop, I generally use just two partitions, one
of which is for swap.  The main benefit to multiple partitions is
that if one of them fills up then the others still work fine, but
on a desktop you're not going to get, say, giant amounts of email
or huge logs without noticing.

> Can anyone tell
> me how this is reconciled with the four-partition limit (if it exists)?  Are
> most of the Linux partitions put in one extended partition (which can have
> several logical drives)?

Yes.

> Which Linux directories would need to be in an active
> partition?  As you might have guessed, I'm approaching this
> from a Windows/DOS background, so maybe these are handled
> differently under Linux, or are things that current distros
> handle transparently during installation.

There's no difference in behavior between primary partitions and
extended partitions under Linux.  I understand that Windows is
not so forgiving, so it's probably best not to put it into an
extended partition.
-- 
<blp@cs.stanford.edu> <pfaffben@msu.edu> <pfaffben@debian.org> <blp@gnu.org>
Stanford PhD Student - MSU Alumnus - Debian Maintainer - GNU Developer
Personal webpage: http://www.msu.edu/~pfaffben