Quote Originally Posted by snarkfinder
I've had issues including more than 4 total partitions. ...
The original MS layout of the partition table only has space to store information for 4 physical partitions. There have been some hacks to work around this and actually store more than 4 physical partitions out there (they hide the table information elsewhere, and move information for (at most) 4 partitions into the standard locations depending on what you want to boot). Extended/logical partitions are the Microsoft approach to the problem they made - one of the 4 partitions is considered an extended partition, it holds "logical partitions" (really just sub-divide parts of the partition) as well as the extra tables that Microsoft didn't make space for in the beginning.

So if you try to make more than 4 physical partitions, you are asking for problems, better to subdivide an extended partition into logical partitions if you need lots of partitions. But there should be no reason that you can't have 4 physical partitions.

Some systems do have a problem with booting from a partition that's track number is too far into the disk, and the huge size of dirve now makes it easy to hit this limit. I think the magic number is 1024, but I would check that (I'm only going from memory and don't trust that I remember it right). People hitting problem with booting Linux might want to look close at that issue. A single large Windows partition might be pushing the Linux partition too far and beyond this limit. Solutions might include making a smaller Windows boot partition, or (if you don't want to do that) making a small partition to boot Linux from, but moving things around on the hard drive (it's tricky but can be done in a number of ways) so that the small Linux boot partition comes first and the Windows partition still starts within the bootable range of tracks.

A couple of great tools for working with multi-boot systems are XOSL and Ranish Partition Manager See http://www.ranish.com/part/ and http://www.ranish.com for more details.