Posted on February 1st, 2007 by
Jason
li>Primary Partitions, Extended Partitions and Logical Partitions: A hard disk can have a maximum of only 4 partitions, which are called PRIMARY PARTITIONS. In the early days of the PC, this four-partition limit was deemed sufficient. To go beyond this limit, a special kind of primary partition called EXTENDED PARTITION was invented. A hard disk could have ONLY ONE extended partition but this particular partition could have any number of smaller partitions called LOGICAL PARTITIONS housed inside it.
Multiple OS and Partitions: Some people have more than one OS installed on their PCs. It is not possible to have more than one OS on a single partition. So, you need to dedicated a partition for each OS. It is preferrable to install Linux on a primary partition. Windows 2000/XP will work on kind of partition. Windows 95/98/Me installs in the first partition on the hard disk. Perhaps you would like to read my writeup How To Multiboot Operating Systems for more information.
My recommendation is to have three primary partitions – two ordinary primary partitions (one for Win 9x/Me and one for Linux) and one extended partition.
Partitioning tool: Windows 9x/Me supplies a partition tool called FDISK. It does not recognize partitions created by Linux installations. So, you might want to use something like Ranish Partition Manager. In Windows 2000/XP, the disk management tool in the Computer Management console will allow you to partition your hard disk.
Boot Loader: If you have multiple operating systems, you might want to use a GUI-based boot loader such as Extended Operating System Loader (XOSL).
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Tags: boot_loader, Computer, disk_boot, fdisk, hard disk, install_linux, linux_installations, logical_partitions, multiboot, multiple_operating_systems, multiple_os, partition_windows, ranish_partition_manager, tool_windows, Windows
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