How to partition your disk for Linux

Partitioning your hard drive is something you have to do more and more often with the increase in size of modern hard drives.

Windows users will be less disorientated if they have already experimented a little with the partitioning of their hard drives.

I could go on and on, but today we are going to talk about the partitioning of a hard drive under Linux. This crucial step is the most difficult part of the installation of any Linux distribution.

Let’s do a quick comparison between the popular Windows and Linux of how to perform a standard partition…

C:\ is your primary partition under Windows. This is where you operating system will be located and will contain all of you configuration files and accounts.

In general, this partition does everything. It is also on the free space of your C: that Windows will place its well known "Swap" file. This "Swap" works in conjunction with your memory (RAM). The operation system will transfer all of its open programs that are not needed by the memory at that moment into the "swap" to free up working space in the memory so that the machine is working at its optimum.

The second partition that exists, if you have created one, will be the next letter, D:\. It is in this free space that you would put all of your personal files.

Linux is very different in the way that it names its partitions. All of the partitions are treated as if they were folders. This means that there are no drive letters represented and instead they are represented by a "slash (/)".

Therefore the principle name is the "/", which is represented by the "slash" (which shouldn’t be confused with the backslash (\) that Windows uses).

For example, the folder that your CD-ROM is represented by will therefore be "/cdrom". The configuration files will be located in the folder or partition represented by "/etc" and your peripheral devices in the "/dev" (for device) folder. There are a lot more then just these as well…

Let’s have a more in depth look now.