Re: Disk Partitioning ? From a Newbie

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Irish, Jon D BAE SYSTEMS wrote:

> Hi All,
> I just read through the Linux Partition HowTo, but I must have missed 
> something. I have a 40GB IDE drive that I would like to partition 
> multiple times instead of using the basic swap, boot, rest-of-drive 
> scheme. After reading the documentation, I thought that I would try to 
> partition it with partitions for: BOOT, SWAP, /, VAR, USR, TMP, and 
> HOME. I tried numerous permutations of using Primary and Logical 
> partitions, but after initializing the SWAP and / partition, I always 
> get Mount Failed: Invalid Argument messages for the rest of the 
> partitions. I am doing the partitioning with cfdisk. I have tried the 
> following scenarios with no luck:
>
> SWAP = Primary, All Others = Logical
> SWAP = Primary, / = Primary, All Others = Logical
> SWAP = Primary, / = Primary, /boot = Primary, All Others = Logical
>
> Obviously, I am not grasping a very key concept here. Any help would 
> be greatly appreciated.
>
> Sincerely,
> Jon D. Irish
> BAE SYSTEMS
I believe / and /boot need to be primary, and I always make my swap 
primary, and the others logical (since IDE drives can only have a max of 
four primaries).

You don't say if you're doing this from another Linux distro or from the 
installation routine, or what.

Before mounting them, the partitions need to be initialized (mkfs 
/dev/hda1, etc). Perhaps you're missing this step?

--
Kent