Types of partions

partitions:

This article describes about the master boot partitions in , DOS and Linux. The total data storage space of a PC hard can be divided into at most fourprimarypartitions, or alternatively three primary partitions and anextended partition. These partitions aredescribed by 16-byte entries that constitute thePartition Table, loed in the master boot record.Thepartition typeis identified by a 1-byte found in its partition table entry. Some of these (such as0x05and0x0F) may be used to indie the presence of an extended partition. Most are usedby an operating system's boot loader (that examines partition tables) to decide if a partition contains afile system that can be used tomount / accessfor rding or writing data.
Primary Partitionis a partition that is needed to store and boot an operating system, though
appliions and user data can reside there as well, and what’s more, you can have a primary
partition without anyoperating system on it. There can be up to a maximum of four primary partitions
on a single hard , withonly one of them set as active
Active (boot) partitionis a primary partition that has an operating system installed on it. It is used forbooting your machine. If you have a single primary partition, it is regarded as active. If you have morethan one primary partition, only one of them is marked active (in a given PC session).
Extended partitioncan be sub-divided into logical drives and is viewed as a container for logicaldrives, where data proper is loed. An extended partition is not formatted or assigned a drive letter.The extended partition is used only for crting a desired of logical partitions.
Logical driveis crted within an extended partition. A logical partition is a way to extend the initiallimitation of four partitions. An extended partition can contain up to 24 logical partitions (you’re limitedby the of drive letters and the amount of hard drive space available for crting drives; ofcourse, it’s senseless to use 24 partitions on a system in most cases, because it will be a dataorganization nightmare). Logical partitions are used for storing data mainly, they can be formattedand assigned drive letters; their details are listed in the extended partition’s table - EMBR (ExtendedMaster Boot Record).
System partition diagram:
The partition from one form can be converted to other form. But this process ispossibleonly between some selected partitions only.