[gentoo-user] dual booting windows 7, extended partitions, and the mbr

[Allan Gottlieb]

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