Need (want) a second Physical Disk Drive (

[George Toft]

George Gambill wrote:
> 
> 1.) How do I partition a Brand New (Raw) disk. I have used fdisk on windows
> machines but not Linux.
> 
> Lets say it is a 30 Gig drive and I want to partition it into:
> 
>     1ea 25 gig ext3 partition for directory "/Clients"
> and
>     1ea 5 gig ext3 (approx) partition for "/XYZ" (To Be Determined).
> 
> What are the command line commands or would this be easier from the GUI.  I
> prefer learning the command line stuff.


As root: fdisk
or: cfdisk



> Looking at the output from the "df" command, I find:
> 
> Filesystem                       Mounted on
> /dev/hda5                          /
> /dev/hda1                          /boot
> /dev/hda3                          /home
> none                               /dev/shm
> /dev/hda2                          /usr
> /dev/hda7                          /var
> 
> Question, what happened to /dev/hda4

hda1..4 are primary partitions.  hda5..??? are logical partitions, all
of which must exist inside one of the primary partitions marked as an
extended partition.  If you run fdisk and press P (print partition
table), you will get a better picture of what is going on.  Here is an
example from my box:

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             1     14593 117218241    5  Extended
/dev/hda5             1         2     16002   83  Linux
/dev/hda6             3       133   1052226   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7           134      1439  10490413+  83  Linux
/dev/hda8          1440     14593 105659473+  83  Linux


and /etc/fstab (edited for clarity):
/dev/hda5       /boot   ext2    defaults 1 2
/dev/hda6       swap    swap    pri=42 0 0
/dev/hda7       /var    ext3    defaults 1 2
/dev/hda8       /       ext2    defaults 1 1


In this case, partition 1 holds part 5-8.  This is what SuSE chose for
me.  Fine.

Here's one I did for myself:
Disk /dev/hdb: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 77622 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *         1        61     30712+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb2            62      1102    524664   82  Linux swap
/dev/hdb3          1103     49406  24345216    5  Extended
/dev/hdb4         49407     77622  14220864   83  Linux
/dev/hdb5          1103      3180   1047280+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb6          3183     47880  22527760+  8e  Linux LVM
/dev/hdb7         47881     49406    769072+  83  Linux

Here, part 3 holds part 5-7.  My way is restrictive.  SuSE's is much
more flexible as you can have only 4 primary partitions, but a whole
bunch of logical partitions in the extended partition.



> Question, what is          none         ... /dev/shm

shared memory, or something like that.


> Assuming I need entries in fstab. what would they be.

That depends on how many partitions you set up.  I've swung both ways,
from one huge part to many smaller ones.  I'm still a fan of many
partitions, but not lots of them.  There are strong points for putting
/home and /usr/local on their own partitions.  I did this when I first
started out, and I tried many Linux distros while keeping my home
directory and my locally installed stuff intact from distro to distro. 
No, this wasn't planned - I got lucky.

As far as command line versus a gui tool (or a command line pretty tool
like cfdisk), I recommend using a tool.  It will help you visualize your
drive and make sure each partition is mounted somewhere.  Now that I
have been in Computer Security for a while, I am a strong proponent of
tools over command line heroics.  I've seen too many changes
fat-fingered by Unix Admins from editing with vi - some resulting in a
box that would not boot properly.  Stupidest practice I was ever
involved in.

George