Depends on which distro you install. I built a PC with a brand new, raw 
hard disk a few weeks ago, and partitioning was a routine part of the 
install with Mandrake 8.2, managed through the GUI. No command line 
wizardry required.

Lee Einer

Ted Gould wrote:

>On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 17:08, George Gambill wrote:
>
>>1.) How do I partition a Brand New (Raw) disk. I have used fdisk on windows
>>machines but not Linux.
>>
>
>To be entirely honest, it's about the same on Linux...  Just type fdisk
>and then the harddrive that you want to partition.  Something like:
>'fdisk /dev/hdd'.
>
>>Question, what happened to /dev/hda4
>>
>
>I'm guessing that whatever you used to partition the drive didn't create
>a hda4.  Why?  Because the first four are primary partition, and the
>rest are extended.  Typically a partitioning program will use the later
>ones so that it has a primary left for latter.  This is pretty common.
>
>>Question, what is          none         ... /dev/shm
>>
>
>Shared memory, basically RAM.  I don't know what it's used for though. 
>I would imagine it's for RAM drives.  Anyone?
>
>>Assuming I need entries in fstab. what would they be.
>>
>
>fstab is a convenience file, you don't NEED it.  Basically it is an easy
>way to go 'mount /music' and have mount figure out everything that it
>needs to know.  If you want mount points done and boot up, the easiest
>way is to do that in fstab though.  Just steal the line from another
>hard drive partition in there.
>
>		Good luck,
>			Ted
>