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Appendix E. An Introduction to Disk Partitions

configurations under which it must run, Red Hat cannot guarantee that fips will work properly on

your system. Therefore, no installation support is available for fips. Use it at your own risk.

That said, if you decide to repartition your hard drive with

fips

, it is vital that you do two things:

Perform a backup   Make two copies of all the important data on your computer. These copies

should be to removable media (such as tape or diskettes), and you should make sure they are read 

able before proceeding.

Read the documentation   Completely read the

fips

documentation, located in the

dosutils/fipsdocs

subdirectory on Red Hat Linux/x86 CD 1.

Should you decide to use

fips

, be aware that after

fips

runs you will be left with two partitions: the

one you resized, and the one

fips

created out of the newly freed space. If your goal is to use that

space to install Red Hat Linux, you should delete the newly created partition, either by using

fdisk

under your current operating system or while setting up partitions during a custom installation.

E.1.5. Partition Naming Scheme

Linux refers to disk partitions using a combination of letters and numbers which may be confusing,

particularly if you are used to the "C drive" way of referring to hard disks and their partitions. In the

DOS/Windows world, partitions are named using the following method:

Each partition's type is checked to determine if it can be read by DOS/Windows.

If the partition's type is compatible, it is assigned a "drive letter." The drive letters start with a "C"

and move on to the following letters, depending on the number of partitions to be labeled.

The drive letter can then be used to refer to that partition as well as the file system contained on that

partition.

Red Hat Linux uses a naming scheme that is more flexible and conveys more information than the

approach used by other operating systems. The naming scheme is file based, with filenames in the

form:

/dev/xxyN

Here is how to decipher the partition naming scheme:

/dev/

This string is the name of the directory in which all device files reside. Since partitions reside

on hard disks, and hard disks are devices, the files representing all possible partitions reside in

/dev/

.

xx

The first two letters of the partition name indicate the type of device on which the partition

resides. You will normally see either

hd

(for IDE disks) or

sd

(for SCSI disks).

y

This letter indicates which device the partition is on. For example,

/dev/hda

(the first IDE hard

disk) or

/dev/sdb

(the second SCSI disk).