I just bought a dell laptop with a single large (500GB) disk. I find getting dell service is easier if I have windows installed so I reinstalled windows from its original configuration of claiming all the space to "just" 30GB.
However this uses three partitions 1. A dell partition (I believe with diagnostics) 2. The main windows 7 partition (c:) 3. A recovery partition (made by windows) I imagine I could arrange to have the recovery partition an extended partition, but I am a windows novice so prefer to leave all of windows as it was (except for having vastly reducing the size of #2). I am now ready to install linux (and grub). Can I have all of linux on extended partitions? Something like 4. Extended 5. linux / (a logical partition inside the extended partition) 6. linux swap (another logical partition) 7. linux lvm2 partition (another logical partition) 8. linux small vfat partition (logical) I am mainly concerned about #5. Googling reveals that you can boot from a logical partition but the authors seem to recommend against it (without saying why in detail). Finally, can I install grub on the mbr *after* having installed windows 7? With old windows systems this was bad; with vista it worked. thanks, allan
