man fdisk
or
info fdisk
and feel your way very carefully indeed. If you have unpartitioned free space on your drive, it should be relatively easy to create and format new partitions. But if the entire drive is partitioned, your job is going to be more complicated.
In either case always back up your data first before playing with fdisk. Let me go a little more into this ad nauseum.
If you have a spare hard drive laying around unused, why not use it to experiment with? Remove your 'production drive' (thus preserving it's contents) and install the 'spare drive' in it's place. Then do Linux installs on it using Disk Druid. This lets you play and have loads of fun.
You can also use a spare drive as a backup (straight copy of files from one drive to another) or 'upgrade' drive, as in jumping from a 20 Gb to 60 Gb drive: in either case, create the same partitions as on the source drive and then copy these partitions to it. See the Hard Disk Upgrade How-To on the Linux Documentation Project.
Bob Cochran Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
Stephen Liu wrote:
Hi Joe,
I am running 4 partitions on my OS, namely boot, swap, root and home. 'fdisk' only allows 4 partitons. How can I create additional partitions
such /var /tmp /usr /etc
Thanks
B.R. Stephen Liu
On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 11:00, Joe wrote:
Randy Chrismon wrote:
I have two hard drives on my computer. The "master" is 30Gb and has a Windows partition on it -- although I can devote a portion of the drive to another partition. My second drive is 160Gb. Both drives are on the same controller. I can pretty much devote all of the second drive to Linux. I will be running a MySQL development server which I don't expect to have more than 2Gb data. My wife and daughter will have accounts on the Linux system. Given all the above -- and whatever else information I can provide that folks might deem appropriate -- what would you all suggest as the "best" partitioning scheme? A swap partition on the first drive? A separate home partition on the second drive? A separate partition for the MySQL data? All Linux on one big partition?
With only 2 physical spindles you don't have a whole lot of room for creativity - but definitely, put the swap partition on the first drive, so it's a separate spindle for performance reasons. If you will be doing much swapping, I'd put one swap partition on each spindle so they can run in parallel for better performance.
You'll want a small root partition, then add /home, /var, /tmp and /usr partitions, so that they can be mounted with different options than the root partition. mount all partitions with the noatime option, and mount /tmp and /var with the data=writeback option. If you have room on the first drive for one of these partitions it might be a good thing. I have heard horror stories about ms windows though, deciding to claim part of a linux partition on the sane disk as ms windows, and essentially scribbling on it, so I'd be a bit leery of that.
Joe
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-- Bob Cochran Greenbelt, Maryland, USA http://greenbeltcomputer.biz/
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