Partition question

[devils casper]

Hi !!

yeah ! amazing and nice coincidence.....
GParted is one of the best Partition Manager.......



.... casper ....

[hiranmaya]

Tx bigfilsing. You are gr8...Your solution helps...

1. Use bigfilsing suggestion and leave 20GB unalloacted parition
Or
2. Use Partion Magic, leave 20GB unalloacted parition

Then install Suse/Linux, it will do the rest

[netstrider]

Personally I tend to use Partition Magic. Anyway I have another question. What is the difference between a primary and a logical partition and why can I only have a certain amount of primary partitions on one HDD? Also, does it make a difference whether I ran an OS (Linux/Windows) on a logical partition rather than a primary one ?

Because at the moment SuSE is running on a logical partition because I can't have any more primary ones and my music stutters...at times in amarok as I've explained in another thread...

[devils casper]

Personally I tend to use Partition Magic.

i prefer GParted only because its free, supports most of file systems, you dont have to defrag partitions before resizing/shrinking and its LiveCD. in case, there isn't any OS installed in Harddisk, boot up through GParted and create partition Structure.

What is the difference between a primary and a logical partition and why can I only have a certain amount of primary partitions on one HDD?

as disk drive capacities soared, some people began to wonder if having all of that formatted space in one big chunk was such a great idea. This line of thinking was driven by several issues, some philosophical, some technical. On the philosophical side, above a certain size, it seemed that the additional space provided by a larger drive created more clutter.
on the technical side, some file systems were never designed to support anything above a certain capacity. OR the file systems could support larger drives with a greater capacity, but the overhead imposed by the file system to track files became excessive.

The solution to this problem was to divide disks into partitions. Each partition can be accessed as if it was a separate disk. This is done through the addition of a partition table.

The Partition Table is divided into four sections and hence the limitation of four Primary Partitions.
Its the design of the Partition Table that causes the limitation. a hard disk can contain four primary partitions, one of which can be an extended partition that can contain any number of logical drives. an Extended Partition is secondary to the primary partition(s). hard disk may contain only one Extended Partition. It is sub-divided into Logical Drives.

does it make a difference whether I ran an OS (Linux/Windows) on a logical partition rather than a primary one ?

Not at all. you can not install Windows in Logical Partition but Linux doesn't care. there are a few exceptions for Windows but this out of scope here.





Casper

[netstrider]

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I always wonder where you guys get the wisdom to write such great answers

[Bjoeboo]

I'm pretty sure swap partition (at least on Debian) has to be a primary partition not logical/extended

[devils casper]

I'm pretty sure swap partition (at least on Debian) has to be a primary partition not logical/extended

thats strange. check again. as i mentioned earlier, Linux doesn't care if partition is Primary or Logical.







Casper