The original partitioning scheme for PC hard disks allowed only four partitions. This quickly turned out to be too little in real life, partly because some people want more than four operating systems (Linux, MS-DOS, OS/2, Minix, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Windows/NT, to name a few), but primarily because sometimes it is a good idea to have several partitions for one operating system. For example, swap space is usually best put in its own partition for Linux instead of in the main Linux partition for reasons of speed (see below).
To overcome this design problem, extended partitions were
invented. This trick allows partitioning a primary
partition into sub-partitions. The
primary partition thus subdivided is the extended partition; the
subpartitions are logical partitions. They behave
like primary
partitions, but are created
differently.
The partition structure of a hard disk might look like that in figure 4.2. The disk is divided into three primary partitions, the second of which is divided into two logical partitions. Part of the disk is not partitioned at all. The disk as a whole and each primary partition has a boot sector.
Figure 4.2: A sample hard disk partitioning.