Partitions

During the installation of Linux you'll be asked about partitioning your drive. When you create a partition you are creating different areas on the drive that data can be stored. There is not really a standard way of partitioning drives for Linux, but each distro has their own way. Think of a distro like flavors of ice cream. Ice cream has many flavors and each person has their favorite. Linux is the same where a distro is like a flavor of ice cream.

Primary Partition

• A drive can only contain 4 primary partitions

• Contains only 1 filesystem

• OS installed on primary partitions

Extended Partition

• A drive can contain 1 extended partition

• This extended partition can be divided up into multiple logical partitions

• Each logical partition can have a unique filesystem

Example Partitioning Schemes

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Partitioning

2. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/installation_guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86

3. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PartitioningSchemes

Filesystems

We now have a basic understanding of how to partition a drive. Let us look at filesystems. Coming from Windows where we are use to only a single filesystem Linux gives us freedom to choose what we'd like.

Please read "Which Linux File System Should I Use?" as this article provides details about the types of filesystems that are supported in Linux. I know it is a few years old, but it still provides relevant data.