Ubuntu – the difference between Filesystem and “Extended Partition” in Disks

devicesdiskpartitioning

I am struggling to understand the output from the "Disks" program. Here I see two different partitions, both pointing to the same disk space.

One is devices /dev/sda3 (highlighted) and the other is /dev/sda5.

Can someone tell me what is the difference?
It is slightly confusing because I do not have two partitions and my windows partition only shows up as one (Partition 2).

Disks output

Best Answer

An Extended Partition is an artifact of MBR 'legacy' disk partitioning, as the MBR system only allows a maximum of four (4) partitions. To have more than four partitions, an Extended Partition is used to hold multiple Logical Partitions.

This was obsoleted by the GPT Partition Table, which removed the cap of four (4) partitions on a disk, but there are still plenty of folks out there with the MBR 'legacy' partition tables, as Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows defaulted to the MBR 'legacy' partition tables. I suspect that's what I see in your picture above.

BTW, Partition 1 of that drive is a Windows Recovery Partition. It is a Primary Partition, just like the NTFS partition (Partition 2).

For more on filesystems, see this article.