John,
Stephen is right: I have run fdisk for years on innumerable computers and never saw provision for the creation of more than one primary partition. So I am speaking of experience with probably the only partitioner in common usage. I have used and am familiar with Partition Magic, so I know there are other schemes available, but we were addressing the capabilities of the partitioners used in the Windows installation CD/DVD and the Lenny CD/DVDs. Besides that, how would the partitions beyond 23 be addressed by any Windows or Linux machine, especially if you have several USB drive ports and one or more CD/DVD drives? And what system would anyone have that could handle more than 26 drives? Wow! just think of having 63 1.5TB drives! Oooola.The standard pc partition scheme allows either four primary partitions or three primaries and one extended. This limitation is imposed by the scheme, not by Windows or Linux. An extended partition can contain any number of logical partitions but Linux can only address a total of 63 partitions.