From: dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org   
      
   On Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:41:05 -0400, Adam  wrote:   
      
   > The important thing, I now understand, is that if there are any extended   
   > partitions (up to 16 or whatever the limit is), they must lie within one   
   > contiguous "block" of disk space.  In that case, I can have up to three   
   > primary partitions, anywhere before or after the group of extended   
   > partitions, which will be numbered in the order I create them.  I did a   
   > lot of playing around with cfdisk to get a clearer idea of how this   
   > works (but didn't write any changes to disk!).   
      
   Correct except for the renumbering.  Primary partitions are numbered based   
   on where they are located in the partition table in the mbr.  The physical   
   order of the partitions in the disk, does not affect the partition number.   
      
   Some partitioning tools will always use the next available entry, when   
   you specify you want to create a primary partition.  Other tools allow   
   you to specify which entry to use.   
      
   For example, you could use sfdisk to create a partition table entry   
   for sda4, even though sda1, 2, and 3, do not exist.  The empty partition   
   table entries for them exist, so those numbers are reserved, for when/if   
   entries do get added.   
      
   Extended partitions (or rather logical partitions within one extended   
   partition) are always numbered based on their order within the extended   
   partition chain.  The last one created will always have the highest   
   number, regardless of where it is within the extended partition.   
      
   Take a look at the output of "sfdisk -l -x /dev/sda", to see the actual   
   partition tables within the extended partition chain.   
      
   > [adam@eris ~]$ sudo sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sort -t '=' -n -k 2   
   > Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.   
   > DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.   
   > How serious is that warning?  I'd used cfdisk for partitioning it, if   
      
   Only matters if you will be booting dos 6.22 or earlier, and using fdisk   
   within it (Might even apply up to windows 98, I'm not sure).   
      
   Regards, Dave Hodgins   
      
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