dont get this primary, extended, logical partion thing

[*DEAD*]

ok guys thx for all the help and i do realise that i am flooding the forum, but i guess im a linux noob trying to install gentoo. i cant quite figure out how to make logical drives. from playing around with fdisk it seems that i can have 4 primary/extended drives, and the rest have to be logical drives. however what i dont get is how they divide the hd. from what i can tell, the primary can take up as much room as it needs, and so can the extended. however the logical drives have to fit inside the extended partions. is this correct?

[drakebasher]

Correct! Due to some limitations that were built into the system way back when, apparently in the 386 architecture, the drive can only have 4 partitions. At a higher level, one of those can be an extended partition which can act as a container for the logical partitions. You cannot write to the extended partition, you can only read/write the logical partitions within the extended partition. You are not required to assign or format all of the space in the extended partition, you can leave some unassigned / unformatted and then partition that at a later time. That's my recommendation for the big-ass drives that people get these days, when an entire distro can be put on 5Gb: save some space for future expansion. I think most users use their primary partitions for their more important stuff, like a /boot partition and /root and then they can have /home /usr, /var and whatever in the extended partition. For some insight into organizing your filesystem read Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy from The Linux Documentation Project.