Partitions

Normal PC motherboards come equipped with TWO IDE controllers [actually they are more technically correctly called EIDE controllers- but we are keeping it simple here!]. These controllers are called primary and secondary, or IDE0 and IDE1. Most BIOSes are set to boot from the first partition in the primary controller, or IDE0. But be careful, many BIOSs will let you change this to the secondary controller, or IDE1! Each IDE controller can have two physical drives attached to it, such as a disk drive, CDROM drive, CD-R drive, DVD-RW, etc and etc. Each controller has a cable with two IDC (insulation displacement connectors) on it used to connect to the disk drives, and an IDC at the other end for connecting to the IDE controller on the Motherboard.

An IDE controller/cable with a single disk drive has the disk drive set to "master." A second disk drive on the same controller/cable must be set to "slave." There are itty bitty little jumpers which you set when you install the disk drive which tell the drive if it is a master or a slave.

There is also an option called "cable select" which is not used very often, but which you will find on some IDE drives. You can just put the jumpers on "CS" in this case, and the system figures it out, assuming the other drives are set for "CS" also! beware! It is probably better to be deterministic in all this and just assign one drive to be slave and one drive to be master!

In the Win2K/NT4/XP world, the easiest way to see around the disk drives is to go to the disk administrator tool in the system administration window [I know this may be a little hard to find sometimes! - go to control panel and click on system admin tools, and then computer management]. This tool will let you partition a drive if the DOS-style MBR exists on the drive [you have to create a single primary partition with fdisk for this to happen first]. This tool will also let you format the partition, and assign a drive letter and label if you want. For backup purposes it may be best NOT to assign a drive letter, so that it will be invisible to normal operations. Only the disk administrator, or the image backup tools can see the partitions!

Be aware that fdisk will only let you create a SINGLE primary partition. So just create the single primary partition, using less than the entire hard drive space (10GB or so is fine) then boot to XP/Win2K/NT4 and create additional PRIMARY partitions. A partition has to be primary in order to be bootable, or made "active" in the sense of fdisk. These ideas are crucial to create multi-boot systems. You can certainly use other tools besides fdisk to do this partitioning. Installing Linux comes with LILO or, with RedHat 8, GRUB, which is the "grand unified boot loader."

Knoppix comes with some marvelous partition manipulation tools, such as "cfdisk," "qtparted," as well as "parted," and the regular DOS-like "fdisk." This page discusses the use of Knoppix. Be careful using the Linux tools to create partitions to be used by Windows systems. You are still safer to use Windows tools such as DOS fdisk and Win2K/WINXP disk administrator to prepare for Windows, and Linux tools to prepare for Linux. Linux is much better at creating a good MBR for booting however. Install Windows first, and then install Linux and use its boot loader, GRUB.

Be careful on assigning primary partitions. If you are installing a second disk drive, you might just install an "extended" partition and put "logical" drives inside the extended partition. In this way you can keep Windows from messing with your drive assignments. Primary partitions get assigned drive letters before logical partitions, so if you create a primary on your new drive, it is liable to get the "D" and your old partition gets a new "E" designation. Can mess up some programs and shortcuts.

In the Linux/UNIX world, which runs on the PC architecture, the drives have different nomenclature. There is no such things as an "A" or "C" drive in UNIX/Linux. There are simply disk drives with partitions on them, and these partitions are assigned "mount points" like "/" [this is called "root"] or "/home." You could certainly define mount points such as "A" and "C," but UNIX/Linux has standard mount points. The two that are necessary in Linux are "/" and "swap."

In Linux, the first disk drive on the first IDE controller (IDE0 in Windows terminology) is called "hda." Partitions on hda are hda1, hda2, hda3, hda4. Since the MBR will only contain entries 4 partitions, you can't have more than 4 partitions, unless you define one of them instead, as an "extended" partition. You can then assign "logical" partitions inside that 4th "real" partition. These partitions have the label "hda5," hda6," etc, even if there is no "hda2."

The second disk drive on IDE0 is "hdb" and the partitions, hdb1, hdb2 etc.

Likewise, the first disk drive on IDE1 is hdc, and its partitions, hdc1, hdc2, etc.

The second disk drive on IDE1 is hdd, and its partitions hdd1, hdd2, etc.

In Linux, you can issue the command "df" which will show the partition used by Linux. Issuing the command "cat /proc/partitions" will show you all the disk drives and partition in your PC.

These pages provide some additional info on installing new disk drives and partitioning and saving images.

Here is a great resource on explaining the boot process in a PC. Check out the "Dual and Multibooting" link. Here is a great explanation of the MBR.

Here is a good explanation of partitions.

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