postid wrote:
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.
The advantage of using logical partitions is that you can have more than
four. If you will never need more than four, you can stick with
primaries. Windows *must* have a primary partition as its boot drive,
even if most of it is installed on a logical one. Early Windows versions
needed the boot partition to be the first primary partition they could
recognise.
Apart from the Windows issues, there's no real difference. 'Logical'
partitions simply have partition table entries in an 'overflow' area
away from the space used by IBM's original four entries ('nobody will
ever need more than four partitions...'). The actual partitions on the
physical disc are indistinguishable as regards 'logical' and 'primary',
and primary partitions (numbered one to four) may even be placed after
the extended partition which contains the logical ones (numbered five
upwards). Generally the extended partition can be totally ignored, as it
is never referred to by anything. Only a slightly brain-dead utility
will automatically generate an icon or link to it. Yes, I've seen it
done. You would use fdisk or one of its successors such as cfdisk to see
the physical details of the partitions.
As Lisi has pointed out, the *nix operating systems use a single
filesystem, regardless of how many drives, partitions or network shares
it may be actually composed of. The /etc/fstab file shows the operating
system how to mount the various drives and shares, i.e. at which branch
of the filesystem to attach them. The mount command, issued without
parameters, will show the current state of play and can be used to
manually mount and dismount drives and partitions. The *nix filesystem
is quite structured compared to that of Windows, which puts log files in
a subdirectory of the system DLL library.
The advantage of this method is that if a drive is filling up, you can
fit and install an additional drive. You can then take one or more of
the sub-branches of the part of the filesystem located on the
nearly-full drive, move their contents to new empty partitions, then
adjust /etc/fstab and dismount and remount the entries (or reboot the
machine) and from now on those sub-branches will live on the new drive,
freeing space in the branch from which they were moved (just copying
them will not empty the space). This is a bit trickier if the 'system'
parts of the filesystem need to be moved, and is probably best done offline.
If you've ever moved data to a new drive under Windows, you will know
that the utility you use must locate all references (shortcuts, registry
entries etc.) to the moved files and change the drive letter associated
with every one of them. This is impossible when references are embedded
within other files. Under *nix, the moved files still have exactly the
same pathname, even if they now live on a share on a different computer.
What used to be even worse under Windows was that adding a new drive
containing one or more primary partitions would alter the existing drive
letter assignments above C:\. Great fun, and at least that ended with
XP. Individual drive and partition designations which are visible to the
user are a legacy of DOS which Windows, nearly twenty years on, still
hasn't left behind.
--
Joe
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