mixture of partitions

[laidlaws]

Looking at my partitions, I have far too many. One mentions that it creates an MBR hierarchy, and others are its members. (Sorry, my memory is failing.)
My idea is to delete then re-create the odd ones individually as GPT. Would that work?

[morgano]

Not replying realy to what you ask, but... I am always afraid to fiddle with partitions.
When I do, i use gparted, it gives a better view.
(and best being booted on a system that do not the disk in case)

You can find much info searching on internet.

MBR basically only can have four partiitons, but one can be an extended partiton containing more partitions. This mix makes it hard to manage, specially reusing space, moving, resizing... I used to early create an extended partition of almost all disk, so all partitions could be extended type.

If you redo it, i recommend using LVM, it gives even greater freedom. And is set up and managed by diskdrake.

If mageia installer boots in EFI mode, IIRC it default to GPT formatting.

[doktor5000]

Looking at my partitions, I have far too many.

How much is "far too many"?
And apart from too many, is there any actual issue ?

[laidlaws]

"Too many" is my subjective opinion. For a while, partitions were numerous, and too small as a result. For a working Linux installation, 6 partitions should suffice. At present, the system boots into either Mageia or Windows without any problems, and without booting one distro making the other unbootable. Windows can tell me whether a partition is GPT or not, and so can parted. Gdisk will print the type of partitioning in useMy only concern was whether mixing them together would cause any problems such as a partition unable to find its table type becoming invisible.

[doktor5000]

Well if you want to boot a recent windows then you should always use a GPT partition table.
And to the best of my knowledge you cannot mix those, at least not as usable partitions. A drive can either have an MBR partition table, or a GPT partition table - not both.
Technically it can, but you can't really use those: https://superuser.com/questions/833355/ ... same-drive

But if your multiboot system works, there's also no real reason to change this, and if you do something wrong and don't have good backups of everything a repartitioning mistake can mess up a lot.