After you’ve installed brand new disks on your server, you have to use tools like fdisk to partition it accordingly.
Following are the 5 typical actions (commands) that you can execute inside fdisk.
- n – New Partition creation
- d – Delete an existing partition
- p – Print Partition Table
- w – Write the changes to the partition table. i.e save.
- q – Quit the fdisk utility
Create a partition
In the following example, I created a /dev/sda1 primary partition.
# fdisk /dev/sda Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable. The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 34893. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite) Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 287.0 GB, 287005343744 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 34893 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 1 First cylinder (1-34893, default 1): Using default value 1 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-34893, default 34893): Using default value 34893 Command (m for help): w The partition table has been altered! Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table. Syncing disks.
Verify that the partition got created successfully
# fdisk /dev/sda The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 34893. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 287.0 GB, 287005343744 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 34893 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 34893 280277991 83 Linux Command (m for help): q