Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX WS 2.1 Installation Manual page 91

Appendix D. An Introduction to Disk Partitions
Let us take a closer look at each of these characteristics. The starting and ending points actually define
the partition's size and location on the disk. The "active" flag is used by some operating systems' boot
loaders. In other words, the operating system in the partition that is marked "active" will be booted.
The partition's type can be a bit confusing. The type is a number that identifies the partition's antic-
ipated usage. If that statement sounds a bit vague, that is because the meaning of the partition type
is a bit vague. Some operating systems use the partition type to denote a specific filesystem type, to
flag the partition as being associated with a particular operating system, to indicate that the partition
contains a bootable operating system, or some combination of the three.
Table D-1, contains a listing of some popular (and obscure) partition types, along with their numeric
values.
Partition Type
Empty
DOS 12-bit FAT
XENIX root
XENIX usr
DOS 16-bit =32M
Extended
DOS 16-bit =32
!
OS/2 HPFS
AIX
AIX bootable
OS/2 Boot Manager
Win95 FAT32
Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
Win95 FAT16 (LBA)
Win95 Extended (LBA)
Venix 80286
Novell
Microport
GNU HURD
Novell Netware 286
Table D-1. Partition Types
By this point, you might be wondering how all this additional complexity is normally used. See Figure
D-6, for an example.
Value Partition Type
00 Novell Netware 386
01 PIC/IX
02 Old MINIX
03 Linux/MINUX
04 Linux swap
05 Linux native
06 Linux extended
07 Amoeba
08 Amoeba BBT
09 BSD/386
0a OpenBSD
0b NEXTSTEP
0c BSDI fs
0e BSDI swap
0f Syrinx
40 CP/M
51 DOS access
52 DOS R/O
63 DOS secondary
64 BBT
81
Value
65
75
80
81
82
83
85
93
94
a5
a6
a7
b7
b8
c7
db
e1
e3
f2
ff