User's Manual

116 Appendix E:An Introduction to Disk Partitions

That said, if you decide to repartition your hard drive with fips,itisvital that you do two things:

• Perform a backup — Make two copies of all the important data on your computer. These copies

should be to removable media (such as tape or diskettes), and you should make sure they are read-

able before proceeding.

• Read the documentation — Completely read the fips documentation, located in the dosu-

tils/fipsdocs subdirectory on Red Hat Linux/Itanium CD 1.

Should you decide to use fips, be aware that after fips runs you will be left with two partitions:

the one you resized, and the one fips created out of the newly freed space. If your goal is to use that

space to install Red Hat Linux, you should delete the newly created partition, either by using fdisk

under your current operating system or while setting up partitions during a custom installation.

E.1.5 Partition Naming Scheme

Linux refers to disk partitions using a combination of letters and numbers which may be confusing,

particularly if you are used to the "C drive" way of referring to hard disks and their partitions. In the

DOS/Windows world, partitions are named using the following method:

• Each partition’s type is checked to determine if it can be read by DOS/Windows.

• If the partition’s type is compatible, it is assigned a "drive letter." The drive letters start with a "C"

and move on to the following letters, depending on the number of partitions to be labeled.

• The drive letter can then be used to refer to that partition as well as the filesystem contained on

that partition.

Red Hat Linux uses a naming scheme that is more flexible and conveys more information than the

approach used by other operating systems. The naming scheme is file-based, with filenames in the

form:

/dev/

xxyN

Here is how to decipher the partition naming scheme:

/dev/

This string is the name of the directory in which all device files reside. Since partitions reside

on hard disks, and hard disks are devices, the files representing all possible partitions reside in

/dev/.

The first two letters of the partition name indicate the type of device on which the partition

resides. You will normally see either hd (for IDE disks) or sd (for SCSI disks).