MBR has some other quirks that deserve mention. The fi rst of these is that the originalMBR specifi cation provided for just four partitions. When this limit became troublesome,a workaround was devised: One of the original four partitions (now known asprimarypartitions) was allocated as a placeholder (anextended partition) for an arbitrary numberof additional partitions (logical partitions). Although this is an effective workaround, itcan be limiting. All logical partitions must reside within a single extended partition, whichmeans that primary partitions cannot exist between logical partitions. As a disk is used,it’s common to want to delete, add, move, and resize partitions, and these operationscan become awkward when working around the primary/extended/logical partitionrequirements. Furthermore, some OSs, such as Microsoft Windows, must boot from aprimary partition. (Linux is not so limited.) In Linux, primary partitions are numberedfrom 1 to 4, while logical partitions are numbered 5 and up. GPT uses a different set of data structures than does MBR, so GPT’s limits and quirksare different. Under GPT, there is no distinction between primary, extended, and logicalPartitioning Disks 1 4 5c04.indd 145 3/28/11 11:57:03 AM3/28/11 11:57:03 AM1 4 6 Chapter 4 ■ Advanced Disk Managementpartitions. Instead, GPT supports a fi xed number of partitions (128 by default), all ofwhich are defi ned in the main partition table. GPT and MBR support slightly differentmeta-data—for instance, GPT supports a partition name, which MBR doesn’t support.No matter what partitioning system you use, you should be aware of one criticallimitation of partitions: They are composed of contiguous sets of sectors. Thus, if youwant to change the way partitions are laid out, you may need to move all the data on oneor more partitions. This is one of the limitations that LVM is designed to overcome, asdescribed later in“Confi guring LVM.”
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