While most of this has been said previously, it has not been brought
together and it has been less than clear at times, so I'm combining
what others and myself have stated into a hopefully complete and
concise summary.
hda5 (or sda5) and above are logical partitions. Logical partitions
cannot be used to store the lilo boot sector.
For a reason I've not determined, Linux fdisk may allow logical
partitions to be created and used without first creating an extended
partition. I think this behavior is incorrect. My understanding is
that logical partitions should be created within an extended partition,
that any of the possible four primary partitions may created as
extended partitions, and further that up to a possible total of 63
partitions for hda (ide) drives, and 15 partitions for sda (scsi)
drives may be created.
Extended partitions of the first hard disk may be used to store the
lilo boot sector using the -b param, however not many programs support
booting from an extended partition. For those programs that do support
this option, ($ystem Commander may be one, www.v-com.com ), one or more
logical partitions may effectively be booted from the extended
partition lilo boot sector.
---------------- /usr/doc/lilo/Manual.txt.gz -----------------
The LILO boot sector is designed to be usable as a partition boot
sector.
(I.e. there is room for the partition table.) Therefore, the LILO boot
sector can be stored at the following locations:
- boot sector of a Linux floppy disk. (/dev/fd0, ...)
- MBR of the first hard disk. (/dev/hda, /dev/sda, ...)
- boot sector of a primary Linux file system partition on the first
hard
disk. (/dev/hda1, ...)
- partition boot sector of an extended partition on the first hard
disk.
(/dev/hda1, ...)*
* Most FDISK-type programs don't believe in booting from an extended
partition and refuse to activate it. LILO is accompanied by a
simple
program (activate) that doesn't have this restriction. Linux fdisk
also
supports activating extended partitions.
----------------------------------------------------------------
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David Stern
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http://weber.u.washington.edu/~kotsya
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