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>A note about hard disks and partitions</TITLE
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>4. A note about hard disks and partitions</A
></H1
><P
>A hard disk can have a maximum of <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>4</TT
> primary
partitions – don't ask me why, I don't know. Apart from primary
partitions a hard disk can also have what is known as an extended partition
which inturn can hold a number of logical partitions – I believe the
number is close to <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>15</TT
>. The extended partitions are not
real partitions like primary or logical partitions in that they don't store
data but are actually containers for logical partitions which is where data
is actually stored – as you can see it is uneccessarily complex. Thus
in Windows <I
CLASS="MEDIALABEL"
>C</I
> is a primary partition and if you used
Windows <SPAN
CLASS="APPLICATION"
>Fdisk</SPAN
> – Windows
<SPAN
CLASS="APPLICATION"
>Fdisk</SPAN
> will not make more than one primary
partition to partition your hard disk – <I
CLASS="MEDIALABEL"
>D</I
> is
usually the first logical partition of the extended
partition. <I
CLASS="MEDIALABEL"
>E</I
> would be the second logical partition
and so on. In Linux things are slightly different. The first primary
partition is called <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hda1</TT
>, the
second primary partition <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hda2</TT
>
upto the fourth which is <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hda4</TT
>.
Linux refers to the an extended partition as in the case of a disk with
<TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>1</TT
> primary and one extended partition as
<TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hda1</TT
> for the primary and
<TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hda2</TT
> for the extended. The
logical partitions of the extended partitions are referred to as
<TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hda5</TT
>,
<TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hda6</TT
> and so on. The second hard disk
would be referred to as <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hdb</TT
>,
the third <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hdc</TT
> (usually the
cdrom drive if set as secondary master) and the fourth and last hard disk as
<TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/hdd</TT
> (last because the
motherboard has place for a maximum of <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>4</TT
>
<SPAN
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>IDE</SPAN
> devices) <SPAN
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>SCSI</SPAN
> devices are referred
to as <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/dev/sda</TT
> – thank god for
that.</P
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