RE: fdisk / Booting From Extended Partitions

["Andrew Campagnola" <acamp ram-it com>]

Hi -

If I can go a step further about booting from an extended partition -

So BIOS Loaders - meaning loaders installed into the MBR must find a
bootable system on a primary partition.

I'm confused about what you said about Disk Based Loaders such as Lilo and
GRUB.
I think you said that these must be loaded from primary partitions? Your
/boot
partition is on sda5 which is an extended partition. ?? is your boot loader
installed
into the MBR or the sda5 Disk Sector?

Thanks for clarifying.
Regards,
Andrew Campagnola


-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-install-list-admin redhat com
[mailto:redhat-install-list-admin redhat com]On Behalf Of Rick Stevens
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 10:52 AM
To: redhat-install-list redhat com
Subject: Re: fdisk


Andrew Campagnola wrote:
> Hi Nigel,
>
> Interesting - I've always understood that booting from extended partitions
> was not possible -
> of course that might only be true in the microsoft world. Maybe Linux boot
> loaders are smarter.

BIOS boot loaders can't boot an extended partition.  Disk-based ones can
(lilo, grub, System Commander, etc).  But THOSE loaders must boot from
a primary partition, since that's all the BIOS can do.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: redhat-install-list-admin redhat com
> [mailto:redhat-install-list-admin redhat com]On Behalf Of Nigel Wade
> Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 9:58 AM
> To: redhat-install-list redhat com
> Subject: Re: fdisk
>
>
> On Friday 25 Oct 2002 4:51 pm, Andrew Campagnola wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>Yes, 4 and 5 should be the same, because sda4 is the EXTENDED PARTITION
>>which holds all LOGICAL VOLUMES sda5-256 within it. sda4 is a MANAGEMENT
>>PARTITION TABLE
>>and is not accessable (and shouldn't be accessed). Only the Logical Drives
>>within sda4 are accessable.
>>
>>In the PC-BIOS world you are permitted 4 PRIMARY (Bootable) Partitions. If
>>you want more than 4 partitions,
>>then you sacrifice one of the Primary Partitions and make it the Extended
>>Partition which holds all the Logical Volumes from 5 up to a max of 256 I
>>believe. Partitions in the Extended Partition are not bootable.
>>
>>
>
>
> Not bootable?
>
> Funny, this system works for me:
>
> Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 3648 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1             1       510   4096543+   7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda2           511      3648  25205985    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hda5   *       511       513     24066   83  Linux
> /dev/hda6           514      1533   8193118+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda7          1534      1660   1020096   82  Linux swap
> /dev/hda8          1661      2427   6160896    b  Win95 FAT32
> /dev/hda9          2428      3648   9807651   83  Linux
>
>
> --
> Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
>             University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
> E-mail :    nmw ion le ac uk
> Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523568, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555
>
>
>
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--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens vitalstream com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    I don't suffer from insanity...I enjoy every minute of it!      -
----------------------------------------------------------------------



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