Several varieties of partitioning programs have been adapted by Debian developers to work on various types of hard disks and computer architectures. Following is a list of the program(s) applicable for your architecture.
Recommended partitioning tool in Debian. This swiss army knife can also create filesystems and assign them to the mountpoints.
The original Linux disk partitioner, good for gurus; read the fdisk manual page .
Be careful if you have existing FreeBSD partitions on your machine. The installation kernels include support for these partitions, but the way that fdisk represents them (or not) can make the device names differ. See the Linux+FreeBSD HOWTO
A simple-to-use, full-screen disk partitioner for the rest of us; read the cfdisk manual page.
Note that cfdisk doesn't understand FreeBSD partitions at all, and, again, device names may differ as a result.
One of these programs will be run by default when you select . If the one which is run by default isn't the one you want, quit the partitioner, go to the shell (tty2) by pressing Alt and F2 keys together, and manually type in the name of the program you want to use (and arguments, if any). Then skip the step in debian-installer and continue to the next step.
If you will be working with more than 20 partitions on your ide disk, you will need to create devices for partitions 21 and beyond. The next step of initializing the partition will fail unless a proper device is present. As an example, here are commands you can use in tty2 or under Execute A Shell to add a device so the 21st partition can be initialized:
cd /dev mknod hda21 b 3 21 chgrp disk hda21 chmod 660 hda21 |
Booting into the new system will fail unless proper devices are present on the target system. After installing the kernel and modules, execute:
cd /target/dev mknod hda21 b 3 21 chgrp disk hda21 chmod 660 hda21 |
If you have chosen to boot from the SRM console, you must use fdisk to partition your disk, as it is the only partitioning program that can manipulate the BSD disk labels required by aboot (remember, the SRM boot block is incompatible with MS-DOS partition tables - see Paragraaf 5.1.1, “Alpha Console Firmware”). debian-installer will run fdisk by default if you have not booted from MILO.
If the disk that you have selected for partitioning already contains a BSD disk label, fdisk will default to BSD disk label mode. Otherwise, you must use the `b' command to enter disk label mode.
Unless you wish to use the disk you are partitioning from Tru64 Unix or one of the free 4.4BSD-Lite derived operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD), it is suggested that you do not make the third partition contain the whole disk. This is not required by aboot, and in fact, it may lead to confusion since the swriteboot utility used to install aboot in the boot sector will complain about a partition overlapping with the boot block.
Also, because aboot is written to the first few sectors of the disk (currently it occupies about 70 kilobytes, or 150 sectors), you must leave enough empty space at the beginning of the disk for it. In the past, it was suggested that you make a small partition at the beginning of the disk, to be left unformatted. For the same reason mentioned above, we now suggest that you do not do this on disks that will only be used by GNU/Linux.
For ARC installations, you should make a small FAT partition at the beginning of the disk to contain MILO and linload.exe - 5 megabytes should be sufficient, see Paragraaf 3.5, “Uw harde schijf vooraf indelen voor een multi-boot systeem”. Unfortunately, making FAT file systems from the menu is not yet supported, so you'll have to do it manually from the shell using mkdosfs before attempting to install the boot loader.