Adding an Ubuntu Partition to My Harddrive

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 08:56 -0500, Chasecreek Systemhouse wrote:
> On 2/11/06, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
> > >
> > I am fairly sure you can install Ubuntu to extended partitions. At
> > least I have not run into a Linux distribution that you had to have
> > a primary partition for. Depending on your BIOS, you probably need
> > one primary partition on the drive, marked active, but lilo and Grub
> > don't care about what partition is marked active when installed to
> > the MBR.
> 
> Question is what application allows you to mess with logical
> partitions hiding inside extended partitions?  I ran into this Monday,
> yesterday, morning:
> 
> Dual Boot:  Windows 2003 Server and FC4.  Layout -
> 
> /dev/hda1 is Windows 2003 server 10GB
> /dev/hda2 is Linux /boot
> /dev/hda3 is Swap
> /dev/hda4 is extended with only /root on /dev/hda5
> 
> Students were asked by another instructor to delete Partition 0
> (Windows 2003) and split it into 2 logical partitions.
> 
> Student comes to me and asks if that is even possible and I reply "Not
> with Windows."
> 
> Fedora Core Question:  Is that even possible with FC4 (or FC5, or any
> Linux Distro)?
> 
> Seriously, I am curious =)

Not with the partitions as given.
A hard drive may have a maximum of 4 primary partitions (one of which is
usually an extended partition with logical partitions in it) and AIUI
this is a limitation of the partition table itself.

Since the partition table already has 4 primary partitions (hda1 thru
hda4) you have the drive partition table limitation.  You can delete the
existing partition (hda1) and you can recreate a new smaller hda1, but
AIUI the space between the end of the new hda1 and the beginning of hda2
will be unusable unless something else is done to relocate/reconfigure
the partitions.


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