Command (m for help)

You should not run this program on anyone else’s computer and you should use use it only to determine the layout of the drives on your own computer unless you have backed up all your files! To exit fdisk without doing damage, enter the command q. The discussion below assumes that you want to modify the partitions or create new ones on a computer on which you plan to install a ‘real’ version of Linux.

Before proceeding further, you should copy down on a piece of paper the above information not only for the disk you are planning to restructure but for all disks on the computer. You can find the total size of the disk in bytes by multiplying 16065 by 512, in the above case, to obtain the

number of bytes per unit (or cylinder), and then multiply that number by the number of cylinders. To find the size of any partition, multiply the number of cylinders in the partition by the number of bytes per cylinder calculated above.

To delete a partition press d and then, when prompted, the number of the partition, where /dev/hda1 is the first partition and /dev/hda2 is the second partition, and so forth. Deletion of any partition marked ‘extended’ in the right-most column of the partition table will automatically delete any partitions associated with the blocks that are in that extended partition. If you are going to set up Linux on the disk you should delete all partitions unless you are doing the initial install from a DOS partition. In that event you should leave as is an appropriate DOS partition that you or someone else should have previously set up using DOS FDISK. Indeed, you can even have on that partition MS-Windows 95/98 which you can install Linux from and then keep and use on occasion for browsing the Web, etc.

To add a partition press n. You will be asked whether you want to add a primary or an extended partition. Press p to create a primary partition. You will then be asked the number to give the partition. Start with 1, assuming that your previously created DOS partition is not partition 1. You will be asked to specify the first cylinder of the new partition—you can usually use the default here and press ENTER. You will then be asked to specify the last cylinder or the size in either cylinders, kilobytes, or megabytes. To pick the last cylinder, just enter the number of the cylinder. Alternatively, to set the size in cylinders and let the program find the last cylinder, enter +nnn where nnn is the number of cylinders. To set the size in megabytes, enter +nnnM

where nnn is the number of megabytes.