On 26 May 2023 11:47, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
Hi, mick.crane wrote:root@pumpkin:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 223.57 GiB, 240057409536 bytes, 468862128 sectors ... Disklabel type: dos ... Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 * 2048 466862079 466860032 222.6G 83 Linux /dev/sda2 466864126 468860927 1996802 975M 5 Extended /dev/sda5 466864128 468860927 1996800 975M 82 Linux swap / SolarisMichael wrote:as i interpret this, the disk in questions has a dos partition table...Indeed. (And as mick.crane already noticed, it is a bit awkward to create an extended partiton 2 only to fill it nearly up with logical partition 5. I wonder what entity decided to do so.)
IIRC, DOS types are limited to 4 "primary" partitions (or 2 ?), but extended partitions have no such limit, and can contain any number of others.
Back in the (DOS/w95) days, you would usually create one primary and one extended, and populate the extended with as many partitions as you want. This way was used to avoid making mistakes : how many primary partitions do I have in the "root" table ?
It's from memory, so 30 years old ^^