Re: howmany partitions per disk possible?

On Monday 11 September 2006 15:08, Tony Arnold wrote:
fdisk scares me rigid! There seems to be plenty of scope for
wiping the whole disk if one is not careful, but thanks for
the tip.

Not really. Stories of vast amounts of unlimited power vested in
all users with the ability to destroy entire systems at the
push of a single button are vastly overrated :-)

Windows's fdisk continually spits out dire warnings, enough to
scare even the old-hands, and I suppose some of this comes
across to Linux fdisk. The truth is that fdisk is well-behaved
and doesn't pester you with nonsense. Nothing is written to
disk till you engage the magic "w" function. Until then, you
can change anything you want to see how it looks and none of it
is permanent. The only thing to understand is that fdisk
presents the disk as a series of cylinders and partitions must
start/stop at these boundaries. Everything else is very logical
and makes complete sense.

In the mean time, I've taken the coward's way out and
re-installed. Given my partitions were peculiar anyway (one
extended containing two logicals, no primaries at all), it
was probably the right thing to do.

For future reference, the total complete entire purpose and
reason for the existence of primary/extended/logical
paertitions is a hack to get around yet another microsoft
screw-up. MSDOS 2 misjudged how many partitions people would
want to have and the current insane partition structure is
still the same patch that worked around that. There is no
correct way to structure these things, and Linux couldn't care
less what type of partitions you use, whether logical or
primary they can all be used and be booted from. Some other
OSes do care about this, Linux ain't one of 'em :-)

alan


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