Partition magic again

[mikevs]

I managed to partition HD successfully without any problems. However, the 2nd partition is not defined as a drive, the 2nd partition is a primary with an extended partition as a logical, do I need to have the part. defined as D: to successfully install Linux and dual boot with Bootmagic.

Thanks.

[KT]

Okay.. I'm going to hope I understood your Question correctly. No, you dont need to have anything done to the extended partition. It servers to simply encapsulate all your logical partitions. When you install, you wont be able to put anything in an extended partition, its a long story, but basically, ignore it.

[demian]

Originally posted by mikevs:
However, the 2nd partition is not defined as a drive, the 2nd partition is a primary with an extended partition as a logical...
:confused: What??

To get the terminology right:
An extended partition is a primary partition. It just serves as a sort of "container" that wraps around the logical partitions. The extended partition - /dev/hda2 in your case I guess - is not accessable by an OS as a physical drive you write data to. The logical partitions are named /dev/hdaX , X>=5. There can be up to four primary partitions on a harddisk (with msdos style partition table). That's why the names for logical partitions start with 5. For some obscure reason any msdos partitioning program seems to create only two primary partitions.

do I need to have the part. defined as D: to successfully install Linux and dual boot with Bootmagic.
Assigning drive letters is a windows thing. And has nothing to do with the partition table that's stored in the mbr. So, no, you don't have to assign the logical partition any drive letter to make linux bootable from that drive. (How would you?)
As for booting from logical partitions: It works fine with lilo. I don't know about bootmagic but I guess it should be able to handle it as well.

[mikevs]

OK, thanks for the help.