Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 11-05-2007 Installation Manual page 169

If you run the expert dialog during installation, any free hard disk space is also listed
and automatically selected. To provide more disk space to SUSE Linux Enterprise®,
free the needed space starting from the bottom toward the top of the list (starting from
the last partition of a hard disk toward the first). For example, if you have three partitions,
you cannot use the second exclusively for SUSE Linux Enterprise and retain the third
and first for other operating systems.
Partition Types
TIP: IBM System z: Hard Disks
On the IBM System z platforms, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports SCSI
hard disks as well as DASDs (direct access storage devices). While SCSI disks
can be partitioned as described here, DASDs can have no more than three
partition entries in their partition tables.
Every hard disk has a partition table with space for four entries. An entry in the partition
table can correspond to a primary partition or an extended partition. Only one extended
partition entry is allowed, however.
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.
TIP: Hard Disks with a GPT Disk Label
For architectures using the GPT disk label, the number of primary partitions is
not restricted. Consequently, there are no logical partitions.
System Configuration with YaST 151