Is it a bad idea to boot from a logical partition? I have two disks on my machine, the larger one (sda) holds my Windows XP partition, my home partition, and an audio partition that I use for live recording in my music studio (I don’t like to record onto my system disk) and a smaller on (sdb) that holds my root partition/s. Since I am multibooting 5 linux installs (two openSUSE 11.0, one openSUSE 10.3 (which I will soon delete, I think) Gentoo 2008.0 and Arch Linux. Obviously, I can’t put all those root partitions on as primary partitions; so I made one large extended partition and installed on onto logical partitions within that. It’s working fine, but it sounds wrong to me. I was just wondering if there is any technical disadvantage to this approach?
You stated it sounds wrong to me , may I ask why ?
What is the big difference between multi booting and
dual booting ?
Except of course GRUB assuming that you make use of one GRUB .
A other thing is that a disk is always read from the borders to inner side . so in theory the boot process take some more time.
dobby9
Why would it be wrong? Logical partitions are used to get around the limitation of the PC architecture that there can only be 4 partitions in the partition table. But in the end a logical partition specifies a part of the disk just as well as a physical partition.
As long as you’re not using Windows boot code, which will not look down the partition table chain for logicals, i.e., will look no further than the primaries in the table, you’re fine.
I suppose I just thought that any bootable partition “should” be a “real” (primary) partition. The way primary vs logical partitions was explained to me seemed to imply that. I am glad to hear that is not the case. Thanks guys!
I have a doubt guys.I already have partitioning like this…
Harddisk - 232 GB
- Vista - 25 GB (Primary) + (ActiveBoot)
- OpenSolaris - 10 GB (Primary)
- Mac OS X - 10 GB (Primary)
- Extended - 187 GB (Primary)
-
Linux-SWAP - 2 GB
-
OpenSUSE Ext-4 Partition - 9.5 GB
-
Windows Seven - 15.5 GB
-
All Data - 160 GB
Now Vista BootLoader is active and has 4 entries.
- Vista
- Seven
- Mac
- OpenSolaris (leads to Opensolaris grub)
If i install OpenSUSE 11.2 in the logical ext4 partition, it takes over the boot and has a Boot entry for Windows that leads to Vista bootloader.Satisfied…Not even a single problem…Even if Windows entry is not automatically added by opensuse installation, a chainloader entry can be added manually and it works…
Now, If i wish to add an OpenSUSE boot entry to Vista Bootloader that again leads to the OpenSUSE grub, what should i do? ?
I mean i want vista boot loader like this
- Vista
- Seven
- Mac
- OpenSolaris (leads to Opensolaris grub)
- OpenSUSE 11.2 (leads to OpenSUSE grub) -> to be added
So what should i do guys ???
Just install grub to / (root) of openSUSE not the MBR. You need to click on the Booting section in the install summary and in that window go to the second tab and select only the Boot from** root** partition (radio button)
The Vista config then just has to point to that. Are you using:
Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies
Yes i used EasyBCD for adding OpenSolaris and MAC OS X because they were in Primary partitions… when it came to logical partition easy-bcd didnt recognize it. 
Thank u very much for the reply… I m about to try it.
Please don’t double post, it makes the job of the moderators and those trying to answer your questions harder.
Thanks.
oops…sorry for the double post… First i posted in this thread and i thought it would be better if i start a thread myself… Thats why i double posted it… I m sorry and wont let that happen again.