postid wrote:
Just finished a lenny install. I used manual partitioning in the
graphical installer to do the following:
#1 primary 19.0 GB ntfs
#2 primary 6.0 GB B F ext3 /
#5 logical 1.0 GB F swap swap
#6 logical 14.0 GB F ext3 /home
#1 is Win2000 and boots from grub just fine. Lenny works nicely,
too, however things arren't exactly where I suspected they would
be, but then I've not had logical partitions before.
On the Gnome desktop, when I click on the computer icon, I get a list
that includes an icon for "filesystem," which appears to be #2 since
it's 5.5 GB total capacity with 3.3 GB used. But I have no icon for #6
which is /home.
When I make a directory of the filesystem, I see that there's a
home folder there that properties tells me is located at / and is
a volume called /home which is 13 GB.
Shouldn't /home be listed as a separate drive? Shouldn't it have
its own icon? Why is it located in /, it's its own partition,
isn't it? Or, as a logical partition, is it physically located within /?
/etc/fstab lists hda2, hda5 and hda6, so at the console at least it's
a separate partition.
I see, however, that that when I make a directory of /mnt it's
empty! If I'm in / or home (hda2 or hda6), shouldn't the other one
appear in /mnt?
If memory serves me correctly, guided partitioning suggested the
logical partitions for a scheme, before I decided to do it manually.
I'm tempted to reinstall, this time making all four partitions primary
partitions.
These logical partitions seem illogical to me. Have I done
something wrong or is it just that way with logical partitions? What
are the advantages/disadvantages of logical and primary partitions?.
I've read about them on the web, but it's still as clear as mud to me.
--postid
No need to reformat, everything is fine.
You can have up to 4 primary partitions on a standard PC hard drive and
no more. Logical partitions serve as a way to have more than 4
partitions on a drive, there really is no advantage/disadvantage to them
other than this AFAIK.
No matter whether your partitions are primary or logical, they'll still
show up as one file system under /. This is just how Linux (and most
other UNIX-type OSes) work. Windows, as you know, shows partitions as
separate drives with a letter assigned to each, a leftover legacy from
the dark days of DOS. As to which system is better I can't say, but the
UNIX style certainly provides more flexibility.
If you need a bit more clarification, try here
(http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/chap_03.html), specifically the
sections on partition types and mount points.
--
Mark.
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