On 7/14/07, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Nigel Henry wrote: > As it's quite this afternoon, I thought I'd ask this question, as it's a bit > puzzling to me. > > A while back as I'd run out of available harddrive space for new FC versions, > I resized the original harddrive from this machine that had XP preinstalled > on it, using the gparted live cd, and it went like clockwork. XP with 12GB, > and the rest was now free space. > > Next I install Kubuntu on the drive, giving it a /, and a /home partition, let > it have half of the freespace, as I also wanted somewhere for another > instance of FC5. For some reason custom partitioning named the partitions as > hda5, and hda6 for / , and /home respectively, and Kubuntu didn't ask, and I > couldn't find a way to make a swap partition. No problem as there is 1GB of > RAM on the machine. So far so good. Grub's in the MBR, and both Kubuntu, and > that other OS bootup ok. > > Now it gets confusing. > > I go to install FC5, again with custom partitioning as I always do, and create > a / partition of 9GB. No problem. Next create a /home partition of 4GB, and > again no problem. Now I try to create a swap partition, and get a complaint > about not enough partitioning space, or something like that, even though > there is just on 1GB of harddrive space available. > > Now I remove the 4GB home partition, and try to create the swap partition > again. This time no problem, and I have an 800MB swap partition. Now I try to > recreate the /home partition (4GB, and enough space), but again a no-go, and > a complaint about not enough partitioning space/no partitions available. > > Ok. I'm not too bothered about the swap, so I remove the swap partition, and > use all the available free space to recreate the /home partition, put Grub in > the / partition for FC5, and some time later after editing > Kubuntu's /boot/grub/grub.conf, adding a chainloader to FC5's root partition, > all 3 OS's boot ok. > > The confusing bit is the available partitions. XP has got hda1, Kubuntu has > got hda5, and hda6, and FC5 has got hda3, and hda4. Quite why Kubuntu was > given hda5, and 6 when it was installed 1st, and FC5 was given hda3, and hda4 > I don't know, but either way it would appear (leaving out XP from the > equation) that there are only 4 available partitions left on this drive for > Linux. > > I've probably done something wrong somewhere, but can anyone shed any light on > this confusing problem. > > > Nigel. > You need to understand the way the partition table works. With a DOS partition table, you only have 4 primary partitions. One of more of these can be extended partitions. This is partition 1 through 4. If you have extended partitions, you can have 1 or more logical partitions in the extended partition. The logical partitions numbering starts at 5.
[ref. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323967/en-us] Any drive on a Windows-based computer can have a maximum of four partitions, which can be made up of up to four primary partitions or which can be made up of up to three primary partitions and one extended partition. You can divide an extended partition into a number of logical drives, which extends the four-partition limit. [ref. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/41189/en-us] The maximum number of logical drives that can be contained in an extended partition is 23. Thus, with an active MS-DOS partition, and all 23 logical drives (in the extended partition) allocated, this gives 24 hard-disk drives (23 + 1) that can be used, in conjunction with other virtual RAM drives, network drives, and floppy-disk drives. The maximum number of total drives that MS-DOS can use is 26: Drive A through Drive Z.
[snip]
Mikkel
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