Re: fdisk program in MSDOS
Michael Light wrote:
I just recently bought a debian software package and I've been reading
the book 'Learning Debian GNU/Linux'. I tried using the fdisk utility
on my hard drive. One of the things I've noticed is that on my menu
there is no number 5. Change current fixed disk drive. Is that
necessary and what do I do if it is?
"Fixed disk drive" is alternative terminology for "hard drive". This
option will only appear in MS-DOS's fdisk utility if there's more than
one hard drive in your machine. By default the utility is set up to work
with partitions on the first hard drive. In order to work with
partitions on a second (third, etc) drive, you would then use the option
5 to set "Change current fixed disk drive" so that instead of working on
the first drive, it'd be working with the second (third, etc) one.
Be aware that there's also a Linux version of fdisk. It's more powerful
than the MS-DOS version, but not quite as easy to work with. Debian also
has another utility called cfdisk which is, in my opinion, the best
utility for partitioning a drive in Linux.
As a general rule, you want to create/delete MS-DOS partitions with
MS-DOS's fdisk, and you want to create/delete Linux partitions with one
of the Linux tools (fdisk, cfdisk, Redhat's DiskDruid, etc); in other
words, you generally want to use the utility for the OS that you want to
create/delete the partition for, whether that's DOS, or Linux, or Be, or
OS/2, etc. So if you're going to have a dual-boot configuration, I'd
suggest you use MS-DOS's fdisk to create the DOS partitions, leaving
enough blank space for Linux partitions, which you should then create
during the Linux installation using one of the Linux utilities.
Another gotcha that you might run into: you can only have 4 primary
partitions on an IDE drive (if you have SCSI, don't worry about it); so
if you wanted, say, a C: and a D: drive in DOS/Windows, and a / and a
/home and a swap file in Linux, all on the same IDE drive, you'd have to
make at least one of these partitions an extended partition. If you're
new to partitioning drives, and you're just starting out with Linux,
you'll probably want to start out with just a single / (root) partition
and a swap partition in Linux. Later, after you've wiped the drive and
started over a couple of times (the best way to learn is to do it
several times, a little differently each time), you can graduate to
using multiple partitions, which is a good idea, especially on a
production machine such as a server, but not particularly important (but
still a good idea) on a home machine.
Kent
Reply to: