Ok will leave it as is. I'm not taking any more chances leaving
my self no backup OS. I do appreciate your help.
What strikes me as strange is Control Center
Manage Disk Partitions doesn't show sda3 at all?
Technically, the extended partition is not a real partition so doesn't contain a filesystem. Rather it is a container that holds all the logical partitions, each of which has its own filesystem. The extended partition is described as a primary partition in the MBR code, so the system knows of its existence, and where to find the information describing each of the logical partitions it contains. This was brought about because there is only enough room in the MBR to describe 4 partitions. The descriptions of the logical partitions are written withing the extended partition itself.
When we talk about mounting a partition, it is the filesystem within the partition that is actually mounted, not the partition itself, The partition only describes the outer limits of the contained filesystem. It is possible to have a filesystem that is smaller than the partition size, but not one that is larger. If one has the room to enlarge a partition, because more data holding space is needed for its contained filesystem, the process is actually done in two steps. In the first step the partition's ending sector is redefined. In the second step the filesystem is grown by adding extra inodes until the new partition size is filled. The GUI applications do this in a way that appears to the user as only one step, but both steps occur separately in the background. Using the command line tools, each step is handled separately by two individual applications.
What the disk manager shows is actually the contained filesystems of each partition. Because there is no single filesystem contained by the extended partition, it is not shown, but the individual filesystems of the contained logical partitions are, and are referenced by the designation of the containing partition. By definition partition numbers 1-4 are reserved for the four possible primary partitions that can be listed in the MBR, and the numbers 5 and above always represent logical partitions. The proper procedure to partitioning is to use all of the primary partitions first. If the total number of partitions is four or less, they should all be primary partitions, If more than four partitions are needed the first three should be normal primary partitions, and the fourth should be an extended partition, starting immediately after the third primary partition and ending at the last usable sector of the hard drive. When this partitioning scheme is followed only logical partitions can then be created thereafter.
Microsoft, because of the way partitions are described as individual lettered drives, in their operating systems, rather than partitions, deliberately broke the best practice rules and introduced the one normal primary partition followed immediately by an extended partition as the second primary partition scheme. This leaves two primary partition numbers unaccounted for, and introduces the possibility to create more primary partitions later, which can lead to confusion because the partitions, as they are displayed, will not be in the proper order as they are actually arranged on the disk. Worse, the additional primary partitions can end up within an extended partition's reserved space, thus creating problems for the operating system's read/write operations.
At the time this scheme was developed, MS developed their own limited partitioning tools to always follow the same rules, and not create more than one normal primary partition per physical drive. Evidently they couldn't conceive of the possibility that two, or more, operating systems might be installed on the same physical hard drive, by the systems owner, or that they would be anything other than MS operating systems. Because Windows operating systems became the established norm, some Linux GUI partitioning applications default to using this scheme, for compatibility, while others do not, and allow for proper partition management. The command line tools always allow for proper partitioning, or MS compatibility, and assume the user has the intelligence and knowledge to decide which is best for a given situation.
More information than you asked for, I'm sure, but enough to give you something to think about.
