On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 12:04:38AM -0400, Jude DaShiell wrote: > When I tried the custom installation, I forget if it was disk druid or > fdisk but one of them asked if I wanted to make a primary or logical > partition each time I tried adding one. For the types discussed here, / > /usr /var /tmp swap and /home, which if any of them should be logical > rather than primary and why? I can understand making / bootable and > setting that as linux native but don't know what to do about the rest of > the partitions and why to do it. There is a long description why use extended partitions. By default Linux can only handle 4 partitions including swap. In order to get more partitions one needs to use extended partition. When using fdisk you create first partition as primary and second as extended which will contain additional partitions visible later for formatting and mounting. using the following command sfdisk -l /dev/hda for example shows the following structure of my primary hard drive: Disk /dev/hda: 2480 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 0+ 19 20- 160618+ 83 Linux /dev/hda2 446 2479 2034 16338105 85 Linux extended /dev/hda3 20 445 426 3421845 83 Linux /dev/hda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/hda5 446+ 476 31- 248976 82 Linux swap /dev/hda6 477+ 754 278- 2233003+ 83 Linux /dev/hda7 755+ 784 30- 240943+ 83 Linux /dev/hda8 785+ 809 25- 200781 83 Linux /dev/hda9 810+ 2479 1670- 13414243+ 83 Linux partition /dev/hda2 is Linux extended containing /dev/hda5 /dev/hda6 /dev/hda7 /dev/hda8 /dev/hda9 If partitions were on different drives then the performance would be much better than what we get with one drive. > > Jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net> > -- Rafael