Listing of MBR/EBR
Partition Types


Copyright © 2007,2009,2012,2017 by Daniel B. Sedory
NOT to be reproduced in any form without Permission of the Author!


This is a quick reference list (some data may be misleading for your specific case).
Note: Sometimes there's only one way you can be sure of the exact purpose of an obscure or rarely used partition type: You must locate, examine and gather info about the utility that created the partition and/or ask the person who actually set up the disk what they're using that partition for!

(For a more detailed listing, see Andries Brouwer's Partition Type Indentifiers .)


NOTE: All Partition Type values listed below are in Hexadecimal.

Remember: Partition types do *not* necessarily specify a specific file system; e.g., 07h is used by both OS/2's HPFS and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7/8/10's NTFS (so for all NT file system versions).

Of the 256 possible hexadecimal values, types 00h, 05h, 0Fh and lastly EEh have been acknowledged as special use cases; see each of their entries below.

That leaves 252 possible partition type values. But you'll almost never see any but a handful of these in use today. This is primairly due to the popularity of the IBM/Microsoft operating systems (and their use of the FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS file systems), the many flavors of Unix (such as BSD) and all the Linux distributions, all of which mainly settled on using type 83h to designate their file systems; apart from swap partitions, which are type 82h. For example, the ext2 (Extended file system, version 2), ext3 and ext4 are all listed as partition type 83h. And no matter which of the various operating systems is running, type 82h indicates a swap partition.

 


Created: June 6, 2007 (2007.06.06).
Updated: August 16, 2009 (2009.08.16); December 19, 2012 (2012.12.19); January 27, 2013 (2013.01.27).
Last Update: February 1, 2017 (2017.02.01).


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