[wellylug] Help - Confusing partitions

[Carl Turney]

Hi Folks,

OPTIONAL BACKGROUND INFO:

I'm a relative newbie to LINUX, running Fedora Core 5 myself.  With help 
from a Wizard in Melbourne, I set up a fast, thorough, easy, and neat 
backup system, using removable IDE hard disks.  (Basically it involved 
partitioning, initialising, and Grubbing a second physical drive, then 
using elegant -tar- commands (once) to create a backup copy, followed by 
regular -rsync- commands to keep the backup up-to-date.  A bit of manual 
editing of configuration files is also required.  If anyone is 
interested, I can email you my step-by-step notes on this.)  Actually, I 
have =two= backup drives, and alternate between both of them, because a 
"lightning strike" can happen in the middle of a backup, killing both 
disks.

It works perfectly, and I've even used it to migrate to larger 
drives/partitions.  A "complete restore" takes ~5 minutes, including 
powering down, finding & inserting the backup disk, and booting up.

THE SITUATION:

New to Welly, my landlady/housemate is Lyndsay (on this list).  I'm 
starting to set up the same backup scheme with her Ubuntu 5.10 system, 
which was set up by Peter Black (possibly on this list?) about a year 
ago.  But the partitioning and usage of the original (working) Ubuntu 
hard disk has me confused.  Here...

(fdisk report:)

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1216     9767488+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            1420        1543      996030   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda4            1544        4852    26579542+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            1544        4852    26579511   83  Linux

(df report:)

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              9614116   1897216   7228528  21% /
tmpfs                   258244         0    258244   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                   258244     12588    245656   5%
/lib/modules/2.6.12-10-386/volatile
/dev/hda5             26162008   3348468  21484568  14% /home

FINALLY... MY QUESTIONS:

(1) Is it important that there is no hda3 partition?

(2) Should I expect any difficulty in creating an hda4 partition without 
creating an hda3 first, using fdisk?

(3) Is hda5 truly a =logical= LINUX partition, created within a 
=physical= Windows partition, hda4?  (Note same start & stop cylinders.)

(4) Could the logical hda5 be created using LINUX's fdisk, as I 
seriously doubt that any genuine Micro$oft Windows utility would offer 
creation of a logical LINUX partition?

(5) Would Ubuntu be able to "seamlessly" work, if I bypassed the Windows 
hda4 partition altogether?

(6) What possible benefits are there to such a "logical within a 
physical" setup, in the original (working) hard disk?

Thanks very much, everyone.

Carl Turney
Mobile 027 6913 080