1) Do not know.
2) That depends on which type of partition. A hard-drive is limited to four primary partitions. I believe some new drives can have more, but four is the limit with most. A primary partition can contain several logical partitions. An operating system will have one primary partition, which can contain a few or many logical partitions. For example: root and home; or root, home, temp, var. If there is a limit to the number of logical partitions, it is far more than most people will need. Most people only need three: /(root),/home and swap. Machines with lots of RAM do not even need a swap partition. The number of logical partitions depends on what the computer will be used for.