From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1OLoHY-00040Z-T5 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:11:13 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D6673E0AC1; Tue, 8 Jun 2010 02:10:07 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp.cs.nyu.edu (SMTP.CS.NYU.EDU [128.122.80.33]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B83CBE0AC1 for ; Tue, 8 Jun 2010 02:10:07 +0000 (UTC) Received: from ajglap.localdomain (ool-4a59b202.dyn.optonline.net [74.89.178.2]) (authenticated bits=0) by smtp.cs.nyu.edu (8.14.3/8.14.4) with ESMTP id o582A6Q6018153 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NOT) for ; Mon, 7 Jun 2010 22:10:07 -0400 (EDT) Received: by ajglap.localdomain (Postfix, from userid 1502) id 74A1919D923; Mon, 7 Jun 2010 22:10:06 -0400 (EDT) From: Allan Gottlieb To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-user] dual booting windows 7, extended partitions, and the mbr Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:10:06 -0400 Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1 (gnu/linux) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Archives-Salt: dbf5ae57-9095-43ac-b37d-fc63445d7829 X-Archives-Hash: 26e7ed67f3e0e0ea41388984f5596dd8 I just bought a dell laptop with a single large (500GB) disk. I find getting dell service is easier if I have windows installed so I reinstalled windows from its original configuration of claiming all the space to "just" 30GB. However this uses three partitions 1. A dell partition (I believe with diagnostics) 2. The main windows 7 partition (c:) 3. A recovery partition (made by windows) I imagine I could arrange to have the recovery partition an extended partition, but I am a windows novice so prefer to leave all of windows as it was (except for having vastly reducing the size of #2). I am now ready to install linux (and grub). Can I have all of linux on extended partitions? Something like 4. Extended 5. linux / (a logical partition inside the extended partition) 6. linux swap (another logical partition) 7. linux lvm2 partition (another logical partition) 8. linux small vfat partition (logical) I am mainly concerned about #5. Googling reveals that you can boot from a logical partition but the authors seem to recommend against it (without saying why in detail). Finally, can I install grub on the mbr *after* having installed windows 7? With old windows systems this was bad; with vista it worked. thanks, allan