For those who are not familiar with hard drive partitioning this section contains invaluable information. A hard drive has a large platter that can hold lots of data, but it is not organized in any particular way when it comes from the factory. There is now a partition table standard for hard drives that allows us to take a hard drive and make it look like several containers for data instead of one large container. If you bought your machine with DOS preloaded on it, you probably have one large partition.
Changing the partition size is bad if you have data you don't want to lose. Always keep in mind that you can change your partition table without losing data, but only if you do not alter the size of the partitions that you don't want to lose. This means if you have a single DOS partition on your only drive, you are in a bit of trouble. Luckily, there is a program called fips. fips will allow you to resize an existing DOS partition without losing the data that is there. You must run the defrag program that comes with DOS 6.2 (or something equivalent) first. You will find fips in the dosutils directory on the CD. We cannot recommend its use without insisting you back up your DOS data first, however. We have not heard of it losing data, but your data is a serious matter and should be backed up.
Red Hat Linux must be installed in its own partition. It is also a good idea to create a partition for swap space. If you have 16 M or less of RAM you must create and use a swap partition. For acceptable basic performance at least 24 M of combined RAM and swap space is recommended.
If you plan to really use Linux, you'll want to divide your system over two or more partitions. That option is discussed below. You can create these partitions with the fdisk utility that comes with any operating system.
As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, if OS/2 and Linux will be sharing a hard drive, you must create your partitions with the OS/2 fdisk. If you fail to partition with the OS/2 fdisk your disk may be totally unusable to OS/2.
There is a fundamental part of the partitioning process that you must get right. You must tag your partitions properly. When you use fdisk to create your partitions, each new partition will have a default type of Linux Native. This is fine for all Linux partitions, but you will need to change it for your swap partition. You need it to be partition type 82, or Linux Swap. Even if you create your partitions with some other software (ie. the OS/2 fdisk), you must still use the Linux fdisk to tag the partitions to the proper type.
A list of drives found on your system is then displayed. Select a drive to partition. After partitioning that drive you will be offered the chance to partition another drive.
We recommend a configuration such as this:
While creating partitions, it is a good idea to write down which partitions are meant for which file systems.
Creating different partitions allows you to more easily back up your data and will also allow you to move your data around more easily should you need to increase partition sizes. If you are using a lot of source, it's much easier to move 200M of stuff somewhere else, repartition, and move it back than it is to move a 600M root partition somewhere!
After exiting the partitioning program, if you see a message like ``Re-read table failed with error ...'' your machine will reboot so that Linux can reload the partition table data. This usually happens if you create, change, or delete any extended partitions. If your machine reboots go through all the steps you did to get to the partitioning step, but skip the partitioning step since you've already completed it.
When you have finished partitioning, the installation will probe for swap partitions. If it finds one, it will ask you if you want to initialize it. It is a good idea to do so now.