[ale] Partitioning

[Mike Kachline]

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	Michael,


<snip>
>miscellaneous things.  It is a 4.3G drive, which my dad says after
>formatting gives about 4.1G. That is why the above totals to that. The
<snip>
	Short and sweet, the hard drive is as big as your BIOS recognizes it as
being (you can force Linux to see a different disk geometry than what BIOS
reports, but this is usually not nessacery to do), which is usually a little
smaller than what the manufacturer reports. Someone else on the list will have
to explain why reported disk sizes are smaller than manufactuerer's disk sizes,
as I don't really understand (or remember) fully as to why this is.





<snip>
>problem is that I want those values after formatting,but FDISK wants me 
>to give the values unformatted, so I don't know what to allot. Also, I 
>can't figure out how to put the partition for Windows at the end of the 
>disk so that linux can be within its 512M limit. Basically my questions 
>are as follows.
<snip>
	First, I don't think that there is a 512 "megabyte" limit on where
Linux can be located on the drive. Instead, (somebody correct me if I'm wrong
here), that should be a 512 *cylinder* limit. Finally, if my memory is correct,
this 512 cylinder limit isn't Linux specific. It has more to do with how the
initial "real mode" x86 architecture works when you first boot your machine,
and will thus affect you regardless of the OS you are booting.
 	You can find how many cylinders are in your drive in numerous ways.
First off, these statistics are usually printed somewhere on the physical
drive. Secondly, BIOS usually detects these values (or you have to enter them
into BIOS), and thirdly, when you fire up "fdisk" in Linux, it will report how
many cylinders it finds present.

   Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 524 cylinders

	Finally, you can determine which cylinder your partitions start on by
(p)rinting the current partition table in fdisk. The columns "Start" and "End"
specify which cylinder the partitions start and end on.






<snip>
>1. How much do I need to allot for 2G available space after formatting
>for the two partitions?
<snip>
	My suggestion would be to allocate 2 gigs for Linux (see below note
about 2 gigs for Linux), 2 gigs for '95, then the rest of the space for swap (or
whatever it is you want). Doing this in fdisk would resemble something like:

#/sbin/fdisk /dev/hdx
(n)ew
(p)rimary partition 1
size? +2048MB
(t)ype
Partition 0 type 83 (Linux native)

(n)ew
(p)rimary partition 2
size? +2048MB
(t)ype
Partition 1 type e (Win95 FAT16)  <-- Note! RTFM before doing this. I usually
use "DOS 16bit >= 32M", but quite honestly, haven't run '95 in a *really* long
time. :)

Now, for the third partion, do the standard:
(n)ew
(p)rimary partition 3
However, when it asks for your "start" block, fdisk will also give
you a range of blocks which you can enter. Use the lowest block number to start
from.
Then, when fdisk asks for the partition size or the end block, just type in the
last block number given in the defaults which they will print out (usually
within parantheses). This will ensure that you've used all of the partitionable
space that you can use.

Finally, set partition 3's type as "Linux swap", set partition 1 with the
"bootable" flag by (the command to do this in fdisk is "a"), and you should be
good to go from a partitioning standpoint.





<snip>
>2. Do I need to create the linux partitions first since they will be near 
>the beginning of the drive? 
<snip>
	Probably not a bad idea, but, I don't think this is nessacery so long
that your bootable partition (which again, you specify with the (a) option in
fdisk) is located before the 512 cylinder mark.



>3. Anything anybody wants to add, feel free to do so. I have never
>partitioned a drive before, so I'm sure I'm missing something. So if you
>see something I should know about, feel free to mention it.
<snip>
	I would suggest not using just 1 linux partition. 1.2 gigs should be
more than ample for a full install of your generic Linux distribution.  My
suggestion would be to create a 1.2 gig partition for your "/" (or root) drive.
This will be where you install your Linux distribution. Then, create an 800 meg
Linux partition and mount that as /home. That way, if you ever want to
change Linux distributions, you won't lose all of the stuff which you've
collected in your users' home directories.



								Hope this helps,
									- Mike
============================================================================
Michael Kachline CS, Georgia Institute of Technlology
kachline at cc.gatech.edu
http://brightstar.gt.ed.net/kachline
============================================================================

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