Re: Newbie question on partitioning (primary/logical drive ?)

[Rthoreau <Rthoreau@iwon.com>]

ThinKer softly asked,

> So I am sitting here looking at the screen (cfdisk 2.11n) and it is
> asking me to select a drive to partition with the list of

> /dev/hda
> /dev/hdc
> and
> /dev/hdd.

Debian can be confusing if you really do not have much experience with 
partitioning.  I would suggest you read the partitioning HOWTO on 
over at the www.tldp.org, this is The Linux Documentation Project 
which is a good place to find stuff if your confused.  

Basically what this screen is telling you is what hard drive do you 
want to install Debian on.  You mentioned you had three harddrives, 
under Linux harddrives are under what is called devices. Or /dev when 
you see /dev/hda it is most likely your first hard drive on your 
Primary IDE channel.   Something like this:

Primary IDE Master: 4.1 GB ------>/dev/hda
Primary IDE Slave: 1.2 GB------->/dev/hdc
Secondary IDE Slave: 4.1 GB------->/dev/hdd

This could also be partitions on a specific harddrive, say you split 
your Primary Master into 3 or 4 partitions then it would be numbered 
in somewhat like manner /dev/hdc1 /dev/hdc2 /dev/hdc3.

So you need to choose what harddrive you want to install Debian on, 
also once you have selected your harddrive it will ask you if you 
want to partition it.  You will get a lot of opinions on the best way 
to partition but to keep it simple you will probably want two 
partitions, a swap, and a root partition.  

So make sure you have a swap, and a root which for the time being will 
have usr, home, var, boot on the same partition as well as everything 
else.  Then later you can add more partitions if you want too.

Many recommend that swap should be about twice the size as your 
memory, so stick with that for the time being.

If you have a problem you can use google and look up fdisk, cfdisk 
howtos which might give you some ideas.

Rthoreau