Quote Originally Posted by RandomGoon
Harry, not to step on your wizened toes but aren't the identifiers /hda(1 through 4) reserved for primary partitions only? I thought once you started with extended/logical partitions you immediately got /hda(5 through ?).
Absolutely. hda1 through hda4 are real or primary partitions. hda5 and beyond are "logical drives" Logical drives reside on an extended partition, but they are not the extended partition, the extended partition is one of the 4 physical partitions that can exist on any hard disk (limited to 4 because of the tiny size of the partition table, just 64 bytes at the end of sector 0 track 0 cylinder 0). So the extended partition itself can never be hda5, although it can contain hda5, hda6 and other logical drives. Of course, you can never really mount the extended partition (just the logical drive or drives on the extended partition), so the hda3 or hda4 name would never come into play. And a nasty little truth about disk partitioning is that the "first" slot isn't always hda1, they can move around depending on how the OS looks at the partition spaces (it was never well defined in a published spefication and some OSs look at the partition table in a different order than others). But an extended partition is one of the 4 real partitions on the disk, not one of the logical partition that live in the extended partition. Or to put it another way, you can't store an extended partition in an extended partition, it has to be in one of the first 4 partition positions.