[vox-tech] partitioning

[Tim Riley]

On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 21:12 -0700, Jimbo wrote:
> Greetings:
> I decided to reinstall due to major system faults that I didn't know how to 
> recover from.  I have been dabbling with different distros for a solid month 
> now.  Partitioning is new and dangerous territory for me but I'm not afraid 
> of living dangerously.
> 
> Found a very cool and lightweight partitioning live cd 
> http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php that uses gnome.  

I'm not sure about the 21st century partitioning tools;
however, the 20th century tools still work for me.

<snip>

> Is it that data doesn't get erased until written over or does the boot 
> loader, and other files, reside someplace else?  Is there a good way to 
> completly remove all data, boot loaders included?  Does installing a new OS 
> overwrite all info if all space is used?  I was quite shocked to see my 
> little dog covering my screen when I thought I deleted all info!
> 

I use fdisk (not the DOS version), mkfs, and mkswap to create and change
Linux filesystems. Here's a rough session:
# fdisk /dev/hda
Command (m for help): p <-- prints the partition table for fun

Here's a copy of my partition table:
Disk /dev/hda: 123.5 GB, 123522416640 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15017 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1       14679   117909036   83  Linux
/dev/hda2           14680       15017     2714985    5  Extended
/dev/hda5           14680       15017     2714953+  82  Linux swap /
Solaris

Command (m for help): n <-- new partition
Command action: p <-- primary partition (1-4) <-- for simplicity, use
only three partitions.
Partition number(1-4): 1 <-- this'll create /dev/hda1
Then set the beginning and ending block numbers and set
the file system ID to:
83) Linux partition or
82) Linux swap
When finished:
Command (m for help): w <-- writes the partition table
Command (m for help): q <-- quits fdisk

Note: this only created the partition table. It did not
format your partitions. To format partitions, use mkfs
and mkswap. For mkfs, use -t ext3 to create an ext3
filesystem:
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda1

To create the swap partition:
# mkswap /dev/hda2

Then you have to make the proper entries in /etc/fstab
so the boot process will mount things correctly. Here's
my /etc/fstab file:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/hda1       /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0
1
/dev/hdb1       /hdb1           ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0
1
/dev/hda5       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 ro,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

<snip>