Linux – Primary or logical partition

debianlinuxpartitioning

I am planning to install Debian and am wondering which partition should be primary and which should be logical.

I want to create four partitions:

/boot  300 MB  ext2  --> primary or logical?
/       30 GB  ext4  --> primary or logical?
swap     4 GB  swap  --> primary or logical?
/home  100 GB  ext4  --> primary or logical?
FREE SPACE for a possible other OS

If I make every partition primary, the partition manager does not allow me to create another partition in FREE SPACE. I guess this is because I can at most make four primary partitions. So should I make one partition primary (which?) and the rest logical, or all logical or,…?

Best Answer

MBR only allows a maximum number of four partitions. Hence you must create at least one extended partition for the logical partitions. In general the extended partition should be placed at the end of the drive.

The real partitioning scheme depends on you. You can create only /boot as primary, or /boot and / (root) as primary, and the rest as logical.

Previous versions of Windows require the system partition to be primary, otherwise it won't boot. Windows Vista and later versions could be installed to a logical partition without problem, but a primary system partition may still be recommended. So in general creating the first three partitions as primary and the rest as logical is recommended. You may reserve one of the primary ones for Windows and let Linux use the rest.

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