How many drives can MBR support?

The correct answer is that MBR (Master Boot Record) can support up to 4 primary partitions on a hard drive. In the context of partitioning, MBR is a traditional partitioning scheme that has been widely used since the early days of personal computing.

In MBR, the partition table, which is located within the first sector of the storage device, can define up to four primary partitions. If more partitions are needed, one of these primary partitions can be configured as an extended partition. This extended partition can then contain multiple logical drives, allowing for more than four partitions to be created on the disk, but this will involve using only one of the primary slots for the extended partition.

This limitation of four primary partitions is one of the key characteristics of the MBR partitioning scheme and informs users and administrators about how they can organize their storage devices effectively. Understanding this framework is crucial for tasks such as disk management, operating system installations, and data organization in Linux and other operating systems.