Help! I've never partitioned a drive

@mortis: You should note that one should at least have three partitions for a linux setup.
- main partition
- swap partition (yes it's possible to use a filecontainer as swapping device, but that's only a fallback and not really recommended)
- boot partition (where the kernel and secondary bootloader is stored, just for safety)

One should consider creating additional partitons for:
- /usr
- /home (to make backups of the user data very easy)
- /var (this one fragments very quick and you don't want that to happen on your main partition, makes it also very easy to defragment - simply tar everything over to main, recreate filesystem on /var and extract back)
- /tmp (should be killed every time the system starts up)

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by mortis

Acid: This will sound newbish but for whatever reason, I can never make that many partitions because (as you know) there is a 4 partition limit per hard drive.

Partially right, there is a 4 primary partition limit. Important is the 'primary' part.

Originally Posted by mortis

At least, in the past anyway. Somehow, I remember getting Suse to do things correctly, but that was pretty far back and it's now vague in my mind.

No, the 4 primary partition limit does hold even now. I don't know if it's ever going to change. But that's not really a problem, see below...

Originally Posted by mortis

Maybe I am missing something here. Or maybe whatever distro (I think it was red hat at the time) just couldn't get it done. Or maybe I did somethign wrong. That though was for the reason for my plan above.

It's not dependent on the distro. There are only two major partitioning utilities for linux, fdisk and cfdisk. Both are commandline based, the cfdisk is AFAIK based on ncurses, so navigation is a bit easier. I'm pretty sure that any graphical tool relies on one of these cmd tools.

Now the important part, or "how do I get past the 4 partition limit". Again, there is the 4 primary partition limit. Now you can mark any of these primary partition as an 'extended' one. An extended partition is also a primary one, but it can contain additional (logical) partitions.
So what you do if you need more than four partitions is to create three primary partitions, a extended partition (which is another primary partition, maxing out the number of primaries) and the create any other partition as logical one in the extended partition.
Note however that most windows tools won't create more than one primary partition. Unix tools don't have these issues.

Also note that the extended type is not of much use if not filled with logical volumes. Means that you can't create a filesystem on an empty (not filled with logical volumes) extended partition. I think you can (if you try hard enough), but it's not recommended and I'm pretty sure you get the OS confused with that. So don't try it.

EDIT: IIRC cfdisk doesn't give you an explicit option to create a extended partition. It creates one as soon as you're populating the drive with logical volumes. So the only choice when creating new partition is (a) primary or (b) logical. So you would select (a) three times, creating the first three partitions (the boot partition should be one of the primary partitions, to avoid problems with the BIOS) and then fill up the rest with (b), logical ones.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Dhsu

What exactly is the difference between the two? Is there some sort of advantage to maxing out your primary partitions? I had the option of creating another primary partition when I was formatting my new hard drive, but I decided to make it a logical partition since I don't ever intend to make it bootable.

It's a question of indirection level. The primary partitions are directly stored in the MBR, the extended partition (I add here that only one primary can be marked extended) is just a link to another table, listing the logical volumes.
I don't think that you get more free space when only using primary partitions. At least not some megabytes, as the tables are usually very small (only some bytes). Also it doesn't affect performance or anything else. It's just that is was done this way since some time and people never changed it. So it's kind of a relic from the post-modern computing time *g*

Originally Posted by Dhsu

BTW, does anyone else name their partitions? :P I was going to label them according to function (data, games, boot, etc.), but as soon as I typed in "Data" I knew that "Riker" and "Picard" had to follow.

You can't name partitions, only the filesystem on it (IF this filesystem supports this). I usually have my filesystems named. I have names like "blackHole" or "gammaBurst", something that comes to my mind when creating new fs... :-)

How ya doing, buddy?