Partitioning Your Disks
Now it is time to partition your disks. If you are uncomfortable with
partitioning, or just want to know more details, see .
First you will be given the opportunity to automatically partition
either an entire drive, or free space on a drive. This is also called
guided
partitioning. If you do not want to
autopartition, choose Manually edit partition
table from the menu and skip to the next
paragraph. Otherwise you will be asked if you want All
files in one partition, Separate partition
for home directories, or if you rather plan to have
a Multi-user system. All schemes have their
pros and cons, some of which are discussed in . If you are unsure, choose the first
one. Bear in mind, that guided partitioning needs certain minimal
amount of free space to operate with. If you don't give it at least
about 1GB of space (depends on chosen scheme), guided partitioning
will fail.
Partitioning scheme
Minimum space
Created partitions
All files in one partition
600MB
/, swap
Separate partition for home directories
500MB
/, /home, swap
Multi-user system
1GB
/, /home,
/usr, /var,
/tmp, swap
On the next screen you will see your partition table, how the
partitions will be formatted, and where they will be mounted.
If you did automatic partitioning, you should just be able to choose
Finished partitioning from the menu to use
what it set up.
Select partititons from the list to modify or delete them. If you have
free space it will also show up under a drive, and you can select it
to create new partitions. When modifying a partition you will have the
opportunity to choose how to use the partition, the file system to
use, and where to mount it. The partitioning menu also has a choice at
the bottom that can be used to automatically partition a drive or
existing free space on a drive, if you'd rather go that route. Be sure
to create at least two partitions, one for swap
and one for the root filesystem (which must be
mounted as /). If you forget to mount the root
filesystem, partman won't let you continue until
you correct this issue. However, this situation should not happen,
because partman by default offers reasonable
defaults.
Capabilities of partman can be extended with
installer modules, so if you can't see all promised goodies, check if
you have loaded all required modules
(e.g. partman-ext3,
partman-xfs, or
partman-lvm).
After you are satisfied with partitioning, select Finished
partitioning from the partitioning menu. You will be
presented with a summary of changes made to the disks and asked to
confirm that the filesystems should be created as requested.