My latest warning against dual- and triple-booting Linux and BSDs

quote In linux you can have only 4 primary partitions end quote

And how many primary partitions do you have in windows ?

:-)

Once they're all re-defined by M$ as "primary partitions," does it matter?

gus3 It's not what MS says., because...............bla bla

Do you know a way ( any way ) of putting 5 primary partitions on " one " hard drive ? I really would like to know

Nikkels

nikkels: You can't. It's in the very definition of "partition". If 3 plus one extended isn't good enough for you then you need some other scheme like slices or disklabels.

Sander

I know !! It's the fact that he wrote " in linux, as far as I know " which made me comment

Note: If I knew where the " bold" , " italic" , " underline " etc was , my post would have been clearer than now. Sorry

IIRC you can simply use HTML.

I tried to use the normal html tags ..etc.., but they never work

My apologies if I look stupid today.

HTML tags are with < and > (see http://w3schools.com/html/default.asp), not with [ and ]. That's BBCode: http://www.bbcode.org/

See, it works!

WOO-HOO!!!!

:P

Sander

Thanks a lot

rijelkentaurus I think you got a problem.

A? :p

Any disk-dividing system (partitions, slices, etc.) is only a data placement convention for the sake of software cross-compatibility. If you don't mind breaking that cross-compatibility, you can store the disk divisions anyway, anywhere you want.

The only requirement is that the boot disk contain proper boot code in the first sector. If it's your own hacked-up boot code, so be it. The BIOS only cares that the last two bytes are 0x55 and 0xAA. The interpretation of the partition table is left to the code in the MBR.

[Edit:] The above is true for a PC, and maybe some other hardware platforms. However, EFI, Open Boot PROM, and GUID partition tables do rely on having partition data in fixed locations on the hard disk. PA-RISC-based HP systems actually have UFS code in PROM, to load OS boot code directly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting#Boot_sequence_on_standa...

Thanks to all of those, here and elsewhere, who pointed out that the four-primary-partition limit is a "legacy" of MS-DOS.

I should probably make the move to LVM and leave all this loveliness behind me.