[microwavecamera]

It really depends on what you're doing. On a desktop/laptop/workstation 1 partition is fine. On servers, all the data is not necessarily on the same disk. It's common to have the OS itself running on local disks and have everything else mounted on some non-local storage like a Storage Area Network, Network Attached Storage, NFS shares, etc.

[monocasa]

Sure, I'm talking about this laptop specifically which has one HDD, and partitions it heavily.

[ianai]

It is a lot easier to upgrade an OS on a Unix box with proper partitions separating things you want to persist across installs from the OS. Makes backups and backup restores easier as well. It’s also best to have swap space be a partition. Though these days probably doesn’t matter.

A modern Windows install has something like 4 partitions these days for the c drive. Ones labeled restore, c, and I have yet to care to figure out the other two. On boot though you see just c.

[microwavecamera]

Sorry about the delayed response. I misunderstood what you were getting at. It's because it's running Solaris and Solaris had different partition scheme compared operating systems now. There's wasn't really a "desktop" version of Solaris so it would just slice up the disk the same way it would on a single disk server. It's a really old school OS.