User's Manual

Section E.1:Hard Disk Basic Concepts 105
• Whether the partition is "active"
• The partition’s type
Let us take a closer look at each of these characteristics. The starting and ending points actually define
the partition’s size and location on the disk. The "active" flag is used by some operating systems’ boot
loaders. In other words, the operating system in the partition that is marked "active" will be booted.
The partition’s type can be a bit confusing. The type is a number that identifies the partition’s antic-
ipated usage. If that statement sounds a bit vague, that is because the meaning of the partition type
is a bit vague. Some operating systems use the partition type to denote a specific filesystem type, to
flag the partition as being associated with a particular operating system, to indicate that the partition
contains a bootable operating system, or some combination of the three.
Table E–1, Partition Types contains a listing of some popular (and obscure) partition types, along with
their numeric values.
Table E–1 Partition Types
Partition Type Value Partition Type Value
Empty
00 Novell Netware 386 65
DOS 12-bit FAT 01 PIC/IX 75
XENIX root
02 Old MINIX 80
XENIX usr
03 Linux/MINUX 81
DOS 16-bit <=32M 04 Linux swap 82
Extended 05 Linux native 83
DOS 16-bit >=32 06 Linux extended 85
OS/2 HPFS 07 Amoeba 93
AIX
08 Amoeba BBT 94
AIX bootable 09 BSD/386 a5
OS/2 Boot Manager 0a OpenBSD a6
Win95 FAT32 0b NEXTSTEP
a7
Win95 FAT32 (LBA) 0c BSDI fs b7
Win95 FAT16 (LBA) 0e BSDI swap b8
Win95 Extended (LBA) 0f Syrinx
c7