[ILUG] dying hard disc - upgrade questions?

[Liam Bedford]

Brian Foster wrote:

> NO. No. no!, *no* .... I was trying to keep things _SIMPLE_
>
> by _understanding_ the theory:  as it turned out, there were
> several points which had to brought together (to answer my
> original question, “what is the best practice?‟, within the
> parameter I set, “extended partitions are new to me‟):
>
>  + extended partitions should only be be the last in each table
>    (and indeed, in the last (4th) slot of the MBRs table);
>
>  + there is an indeterminate number of logical partitions per
>    extended;
>
>  + each table within an extended should consist of just one
>    logical optionally followed by a pointer to another table
>    _within_ the same extended;
>  
>
which can lead to the unfortunate situation of something breaking on 
logical partition 1 taking
out all the other logical partitions..

> and
>  + not all software (e.g., O/S's) like/tolerate/grok anything
>    else; nor can all boot from a logical.
>
>  
>
AIUI, pretty much nothing _boots_ from a logical partition. The standard 
MBR boots
the BR of whichever partition is active (1 - 4, or 0 - 3 for grub). If 
the boot loader can
then read the kernel/OS from anywhere, then great, you can continnue to 
boot from the logical
partition.

The other part of that is that not all disk partition programs can make 
an extended partition active,
so if it breaks, and you're in windows, you may not be able to set it 
back active again. I mention
this, because my normal way of doing things is to leave the MBR alone, 
and install the boot loader
into the partition of the OS. That way, I set my linux partition active, 
and if I need to install something
else, it doesn't have to remove grub from the MBR and put its code in 
there. Then I can use
fdisk/diskpart/parted to make whichever partition I want active (this is 
from the days when I did
windows installs regularly due to broken drivers etc, and windows 
overwrites the MBR by default).

L.