Before You Begin

73

Partitioning the Hard Drive

Outside of choosing which packages, of the many provided by Debian, that

you wish to install on your system, the hardest part of any Linux installation

is determining how to partition your hard disk drive. The following discussion

is an attempt to simplify the problem for the first time user of Debian.

First, what is a partition anyway? Many DOS machines only offer the C: drive

as a valid disk device, but many of these machines have D: devices and more!

Many times these additional  drives  are actually another physical hard drive

connected to the machine, but more often they are not. Many OS installations

(and even some Linux distributions) simply consume the physical disk device

in one large chunk, called a partition. This single partition gets formatted

with the desired file system and then sub directories and files can be created

within that file system.

Using partitions it is possible to divide one physical device into several parti 

tions, and assign each partition a unique device name. In DOS these would be

C:, D:, E:, etc. . . In Linux these are called /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, etc. . . for

the first physical IDE device on the system and /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdb2, etc. . .

for the second physical IDE device.