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Information about partitions on a hard disk is stored in a special disk area – in the 1
sector of the 0
called the Master Boot Record, MBR.
A physical hard disk can contain up to 4 primary partitions. This limitation is due only
to the capacity of the Partition Table, which itself consists of only four partitions.
However, this does not mean that you can install only 4 different operating systems.
Modern software disk managers allows the installation of many more operating
systems. For example, the Acronis OS Selector 5.0 Deluxe disk manager, allows a user
to install up to 100 operating systems on one hard disk!
Partitioning hard disks is a feature that is available in all operating systems.
A.4
Creating Partitions for Other OSes
In this part of the Guide we have described the way to partition a hard disk
by the FDISK program for the DOS/Windows operating system. As it has
been said above, the FDISK program creates primary and possibly (but
necessarily so) extended DOS partitions and logical partitions (disks) on
them, and can also leave disk space unallocated to be used by other
operating systems. However, the Windows operating system, while being a
very widely distributed operating system for PCs, is not the only operating
system.
You can configure the hard disk of your computer to used with the Linux
operating system. In this case you do not need to create either primary nor
extended DOS partitions (if you are not going to use DOS/Windows).
For example, the installation program from the ASPLinux operating system
includes a disk manager that allows partitioning a disk into partitions that can
be used by this OS.
A.5
Primary and Logical Partitions
Many operating systems, including DOS and Windows 95, can only be booted
from primary partitions.
Some operating systems do not see primary partitions except those they
were booted from (OS/2).
Knowing these limitations allows you to decide what partitions are better to
use and for what purposes. Primary partitions are better used for booting
operating systems and storing system folders and files.
Logical partitions can keep all the other information, since they are accessible
from most operating systems.
th
cylinder, header 0, which is called a Partition Table. This sector is
Acronis TrueImage Deluxe
st
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