I have just been installing Xubuntu on my netbook and after I have let the setup wipe the disk and install it by itself out of laziness. It was half into the setup that I noticed I haven't seen it create a swap partition in the confirmation dialog, so I have let it complete and then restarted it to manually partition it.
After reading a bit more on the matter itself before doing random things, I have come to the knowledge to place the swap partition at the beginning of the drive so it can be accessed fast and also to place /boot
within the first 100 GB of the drive so the BIOS can find and boot from it. I also read more about the importance and advantages of partitions in general and decided to create a few more than just swap
, /boot
and /
.
So halfway into it, having created swap
first as logical partition, /boot
second as primary partition and /
as well as /var
as logical partition, the setup refused to create more, stating it was not possible for me to create more than four primary partitions.
Now this was the moment when confusion hit me like a train as I have already read before about that (which is why I have had selected logical for anything but /boot
in the first place), because I have only created a single primary partition and not four as the setup stated.
During my research I found that the solution for creating more than four was to use extended partitions but the setup (as opposed to gparted) did not even give me the option to select anything but primary and logical, whereas it obviously didn't even care what I selected and created only primaries.
I messed around a bit with it and was able to create tons of small logical partitions in a row, but as soon as I have applied the above mentioned configuration, it was over.
So, does the order of the logical and primary partitions matter? If yes, how am I supposed to adhere to "place swap
at the beginning of the drive" and "keep your /boot
within the first 100GB of the drive" and have more than just two more additional partitions?