I noticed that I have a strange partition under sda3
, with a size of 1K. I am about to reformat my hard drive and re-install my OS with Ubuntu 14.04 while creating separate partitions for /
and /home
.
What is this almost-empty partition, and should I do anything with it? Why is it in lsblk
but not in blkid
?
[lucas@lucas-ThinkPad-W520]~$ sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="SYSTEM_DRV" UUID="30CA6C06CA6BC6A6" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="Windows7_OS" UUID="9426707E26706362" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda4: LABEL="Lenovo_Recovery" UUID="E2CA772DCA76FD5B" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="7d513625-85de-41b7-9c81-0d3fbc4e6a0f" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda6: UUID="602d2625-8ab9-44e5-b73a-d1f0181f5549" TYPE="swap"
[lucas@lucas-ThinkPad-W520]~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1.5G 0 part /media/lucas/SYSTEM_DRV
├─sda2 8:2 0 262.1G 0 part /media/lucas/Windows7_OS
├─sda3 8:3 0 1K 0 part
├─sda4 8:4 0 15.6G 0 part /media/lucas/Lenovo_Recovery
├─sda5 8:5 0 178.7G 0 part /
└─sda6 8:6 0 7.9G 0 part [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
Best Answer
That is almost certainly the extended partition that contains your logical ones. You should be able to confirm by running
parted -l
(orfdisk -l
) as root. For example, on my system:Note that sda4 is listed as an extended partition with a size of 400GB. That is the sum of the sizes of the logical partitions it contains (5,7,6 and 8). In the
lsblk
output, it shows as a 1K partition (because it is not a real, bona fide partition that contains data but an extended one):It does not appear in the output of
blkid
for the same reason, it only lists "real" partitions by default. You can force it to mention the extended one by using the-p
flag: