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Why is the limitation on the number of partitions set to 4?

Any reference would be useful.

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… except that 4 is not the limit. Knowing that, you could have asked a question that doesn't require a falsehood as its premise such as "What is the maximum number of partitions that can be made on a hard disc?" … except that that question has already been asked. – JdeBP Dec 23 '11 at 16:42
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migrated from serverfault.com Dec 20 '11 at 22:46

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2 Answers

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The limitation is 4 Primary partitions and comes from the structure of the Master Boot Record(MBR). However, you could have 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition which can have any number of logical partitions within it.

EFI supports GUID partition tables, which do not have this limitation.

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up vote 3 down vote

It is not a Linux issue. Standard disc partitions (supported by BIOS) only allow 4 partitions. The standard formatting for discs is ancient.

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