Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP2 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 08-05-2008 Deployment Manual page 164

A primary partition simply consists of a continuous range of cylinders (physical disk
areas) assigned to a particular operating system. With primary partitions only, you are
limited to four partitions per hard disk, because more do not fit in the partition table.
This is why extended partitions are used. Extended partitions are also continuous ranges
of disk cylinders, but an extended partition may itself be subdivided into logical parti-
tions. Logical partitions do not require entries in the partition table. In other words, an
extended partition is a container for logical partitions.
If you need more than four partitions, create an extended partition as the fourth partition
or earlier. This extended partition should span the entire remaining free cylinder range.
Then create multiple logical partitions within the extended partition. The maximum
number of logical partitions is 15 on SCSI, SATA, and Firewire disks and 63 on (E)IDE
disks. It does not matter which types of partitions are used for Linux. Primary and log-
ical partitions both work fine.
Creating a Partition
To create a partition from scratch, proceed as follows:
1 Select Create. If several hard disks are connected, a selection dialog appears in
2 Specify the partition type (primary or extended). Create up to four primary parti-
3 Select the file system to use and a mount point. YaST suggests a mount point
4 Specify additional file system options if your setup requires them. This is neces-
5 Click OK > Apply to apply your partitioning setup and leave the partitioning
148 Deployment Guide
which to select a hard disk for the new partition.
tions or up to three primary partitions and one extended partition. Within the
extended partition, create several logical partitions (see
(page 147)).
for each partition created. Refer to
for details on the various file systems.
sary, for example, if you need persistent device names. For details on the available
options, refer to Section "Editing a Partition"
module.
If you created the partition during installation, you are returned to the installation
overview screen.
Section "Partition Types"
Chapter 22, File Systems in Linux
(page 149).
(page 471)