Basic Partitions

Working with disks is an important part of maintaining storage space on your system. Partitions determine how your storage space is carved out for use later by the system and its users. When adding more storage or creating it for the first time, you should partition your disk space into a logical format for use later. Many installers come with an “automated” partitioning option for those that don’t need a custom layout; however, most system administrators will probably want to lay out their own partitions. In the lab, RHEL01 is configured with four hard disks. You will use three of these drives (the smaller ones) to set up custom partitions. All drives are IDE (/dev/hdx) versus /dev/sdx for SCSI/SATA users. Before you begin partitioning, you should look at the drives currently available for use as well as the current partitions on any of these drives. You can use two different utilities when partitioning disks:

fdisk	Disk-partitioning utility
parted	Another disk-partitioning utility