Creating partitions with Druid

Now we are ready to create the partitions for our system. At this point you either choose or create a partition for the installation. You must pay attention if you have more than one hard drive in order to select the appropriate. For the first IDE hard drive would be: hda and for the second would be hdb, the first SCSI sda and so on.

When creating your partition you will see five useful options on the panel: Clear all, Auto Allocate, More, Undo and Done.

Clear all: Clears everything current on the partition table.

Auto allocate: Displays three options that allocates the partition automatically based on needs.

• With /user
• Simple
• Server

More: Under this option there are other options that you might need:

• Save partition table
• Restore partition table
• Rescue partition table
• Reload partition table
  &
• Removable media auto mounting

Undo: This option undoes any changes you just made to the partition before save.
Done: Use this to save the changes made to the partition table.

Sit back and relax, creating partitions is not that difficult when you are working with Linux. You will love mandrake after this installation; everything is visual. Other distributions offer visual but not intuitive as mandrake.

Any distribution that you decide to go with will be exactly the same at system level. Some are easy to understand and some not. I truly believe that after this installation you will be able to install any Linux distribution.

To begin manipulating the partition table, click on the blank space (remaining) of the hard drive and then click on auto allocate.

Option 1

1. Select the first option with /user and click OK

That will create:

Fig. 1.14

If you decide to keep this option, Click on Done to save, otherwise click on Clear all or Undo (clear all, clears everything, including your current windows partition).

Option 2

1. Click on auto allocate again; now select simple and click OK.

That will create:

Fig. 1.15

Again if you want to keep this option, click on Done otherwise click on Undo, or clear all.

Option 3 (This option is what we need)

1. Click on auto allocate, this time select Server

This will create the most important layout that you will need for your server.

That will create:

Fig. 1.16

Once you clicked ok, the disk druid auto allocates the space for each partition. To keep this setting click Done to save.

Hey, this is just a demo. If you are not satisfied with the allocation size you can create the partitions manually.