help with cfdisk, logical partitions, and co-resident DOS

[John Cook <john.cook@kla-tencor.com>]

Hi.

I ran through my first Debian installation last night.  
The installation procedure is very nice!  The last time 
I installed Linux was with Slackware 2.3(!); Debian is 
a huge improvement.  (I am using 1.3.1.)

My question regards putting lots of partitions onto my 
meager 2.1 GB SCSI drive.  I am trying for the following, 
in this order:

  250 MB DOS (primary partition)

  800 MB extended partition with five logical partitions:
      250 MB DOS logical drive
       50 MB Linux /
      300 MB Linux /usr
      150 MB Linux /home
       50 MB Linux /var

   64 MB Linux swap (primary partition)

  950 MB Windows NT (primary partition)

I created the DOS primary partition and 800 MB extended 
partition (with 250 MB DOS logical drive) using MS-DOS 
FDISK, installed lots of DOS-ish stuff, backed up everything, 
and forged ahead with the Debian install.  

cfdisk let me add /dev/sda6 for /, /dev/sda7 for /usr, 
/dev/sda8 for /home, /dev/sda9 for /var, and /dev/sda3 
for swap.  What puzzled me was that in creating the logical 
partitions, the cfdisk default size for each partition was 
not the largest partition that would fit in the (already 
defined) extended partition, but rather the remaining free 
space on the entire disk!  Does cfdisk adjust the size of an 
already-defined extended partition as it needs, rather than 
constraining to the size of the existing extended partition?

I completed the rest of the Debian base system installation 
with no problems, but DOS now thinks there's an E: drive on 
my system.  Is this an unavoidable consequence of sharing an 
extended partition between DOS and Linux?

Finally, does anyone have a better suggestion for arranging 
these eight partitions on a single disk?  As I understand it, 
the maximum number of partitions I can put on a single fixed 
disk are either (a) four primary partitions or (b) three 
primary partitions and one extended partition, where the 
extended partition can have an arbitrary number of logical 
partitions.

Thanks,

John Cook


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