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Disk Drive with Partition Table
Image of an unused disk drive with a partition table.
partitions/unused-partitioned-drive.png
As xref:figu-partitions-partition-table[Disk Drive with Partition Table] shows, the partition table is divided into four sections or four _primary_ partitions. A primary partition is a partition on a hard drive that can contain only one logical drive (or section). Each section can hold the information necessary to define a single partition, meaning that the partition table can define no more than four partitions.
Each partition table entry contains several important characteristics of the partition:
The points on the disk where the partition starts and ends
Whether the partition is "active"
The partition's type
The starting and ending points define the partition's size and location on the disk. The "active" flag is used by some operating systems' boot loaders. In other words, the operating system in the partition that is marked "active" is booted.
The type is a number that identifies the partition's anticipated usage. Some operating systems use the partition type to denote a specific file system type, to flag the partition as being associated with a particular operating system, to indicate that the partition contains a bootable operating system, or some combination of the three.
See xref:figu-partitions-single-part[Disk Drive With Single Partition] for an example of a disk drive with single partition.
Disk Drive With Single Partition
Image of a disk drive with a single partition.
partitions/dos-single-partition.png
The single partition in this example is labeled as `DOS`. This label shows the *partition type*, with `DOS` being one of the most common ones. The table below shows a list of some of the commonly used partition types and hexadecimal numbers used to represent them.
Partition Types
|Partition Type|Value|Partition Type|Value
|Empty|00|Novell Netware 386|65
|DOS 12-bit FAT|01|PIC/IX|75
|XENIX root|02|Old MINIX|80
|XENIX usr|03|Linux/MINUX|81
|DOS 16-bit <=32M|04|Linux swap|82
|Extended|05|Linux native|83
|DOS 16-bit >=32|06|Linux extended|85
|OS/2 HPFS|07|Amoeba|93
|AIX|08|Amoeba BBT|94
|AIX bootable|09|BSD/386|a5
|OS/2 Boot Manager|0a|OpenBSD|a6
|Win95 FAT32|0b|NEXTSTEP|a7
|Win95 FAT32 (LBA)|0c|BSDI fs|b7
|Win95 FAT16 (LBA)|0e|BSDI swap|b8
|Win95 Extended (LBA)|0f|Syrinx|c7
|Venix 80286|40|CP/M|db
|Novell|51|DOS access|e1
|PReP Boot|41|DOS R/O|e3
|GNU HURD|63|DOS secondary|f2
|Novell Netware 286|64|BBT|ff
Partitions Within Partitions - An Overview of Extended Partitions
In case four partitions are insufficient for your needs, you can use _extended partitions_ to create up additional partitions. You do this by setting the type of a partition to "Extended".
An extended partition is like a disk drive in its own right - it has its own partition table which points to one or more partitions (now called _logical partitions_, as opposed to the four _primary partitions_) contained entirely within the extended partition itself. xref:figu-partitions-extended[Disk Drive With Extended Partition], shows a disk drive with one primary partition and one extended partition containing two logical partitions (along with some unpartitioned free space).
Disk Drive With Extended Partition
Image of a disk drive with an extended partition.
partitions/extended-partitions.png
As this figure implies, there is a difference between primary and logical partitions - there can only be four primary partitions, but there is no fixed limit to the number of logical partitions that can exist. However, due to the way in which partitions are accessed in Linux, no more than 12 logical partitions should be defined on a single disk drive.
GUID Partition Table (GPT)
GUID Partition Table (*GPT*) is a newer partitioning scheme based on using Globally Unique Identifiers (*GUID*). *GPT* was developed to cope with limitations of the *MBR* partition table, especially with the limited maximum addressable storage space of a disk. Unlike *MBR*, which is unable to address storage space larger than 2.2 terabytes, *GPT* can be used with hard disks larger than this; the maximum addressable disk size is 2.2 zettabytes. In addition, *GPT* by default supports creating up to 128 primary partitions. This number could be extended by allocating more space to the partition table.
*GPT* disks use logical block addressing (LBA) and the partition layout is as follows:
To preserve backward compatibility with MBR disks, the first sector (*LBA* 0) of *GPT* is reserved for *MBR* data and it is called "protective MBR".
The _primary *GPT* header_ begins on the second logical block (*LBA* 1) of the device. The header contains the disk GUID, the location of the primary partition table, the location of the secondary GPT header, and CRC32 checksums of itself and the primary partition table. It also specifies the number of partition entries of the table.
The _primary *GPT* table_ includes, by default, 128 partition entries, each with an entry size 128 bytes, its partition type GUID and unique partition GUID.
The _secondary *GPT* table_ is identical to the primary *GPT* table. It is used mainly as a backup table for recovery in case the primary partition table is corrupted.

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Source string description
type: Block title
Flags
no-wrap, read-only
Source string location
./pages/appendixes/Disk_Partitions.adoc:118
String age
4 years ago
Last updated
a year ago
Source string age
4 years ago
Translation file
pot/f33/pages/appendixes/Disk_Partitions.pot, string 53