Tuesday, January 20 2009 @ 03:07 PM EST Contributed by: sde
As usual, this blog post comes out of something I have been working on (read as: struggling with) for the past few days. The purpose is to give an overview of disk partitioning under Linux, specifically as it relates to PC BIOS systems, and to make a suggestion about partition names and references.
A typical PC BIOS will allow a maximum of four partitions to be created on one disk. Corresponding to this, Linux reserves the first four device names on a disk drive to match these four partitions - regardless of how many partitions you actually create. This means that in the typical case the device names /dev/sda1 ... /dev/sda4 (or hda1 ... hda4, depending on what version of Linux you are using and what kind of disk controller you have) will be assigned to those partitions. If you don't create all four partitions you will not see all of these names in the /dev directory, but they will be reserved none the less, and as we will see next, they will not be used for any subsequent partitions that may be created. Likewise, GRUB reserves its first four identifiers, (hd0,0) ... (hd0,3) for the four physical partitions.
