Hi Fellows! My OS[Linux Mint] is near to crash because of my endless, inappropriate experiments. But what to do, My endless curiosity doesn’t leave My OS alone.
In this post I m going to demonstrate how to partition a Hard Disk/Flash Drive without any extra tools. All you have to do is to enter some commands in CLI. I’m using My 1GB small old pen drive. And please make sure that you have chose the correct device. Else I don’t have to say what would happen!
Open the terminal/konsole, then identify your device by giving,
fdisk -l (I have done this in an early time in detail)
My device is /dev/sda1.
cfdisk /dev/sda1 (cfdisk is the Curses based disk partition table manipulator for Linux)
then you l end with something like this,
cfdisk /dev/sda1
In My example I m creating 2 partitions. And one of them is a swap area. Navigate to New using arrow keys. Press enter. you l end up with the following result,
Creating a New Primary partition
Press Enter. Then give the Partition size you want.
Assigning The Partition Size
I gave 800MB for My 1st partition. Press Enter.
Add Partition at Beginning of Free Space
Select Beginning. It will create the partition at the beginning. Or if you want it at the end select End.As I done the fist partition(sda1p1), I have created another partition named sda1p2.
Two Partitions are Created
With the arrow keys navigate to Type. Then press Enter.
Selecting a File System
Check this out. you get a big list with a variety of file systems. I want mine as Linux Extended. I went step forward by pressing a key. Then gave the corresponding number for Linux Extended.
Entering The Filr System Type
Following the same steps, I set the other partition’s file system as swap. Finally select Write and press Enter.
- Write Partition Table to Disk
Its good to go! We are done with partitioning.
…….Later……
November 25, 2008 at 7:07 am
Nice step by step tutorial. May I add something
command to list mounted file systems
$mount
command to find recently plugged devices
$dmesg | tail
list plugged usb devices
$lsusb
hope this helps. And of course you should unmount device before you format/partition.
February 24, 2009 at 9:06 am
[...] gently; my personal favorite, Slackware, does not. It asks you to use either Linux fdisk or Linux cfdisk to do it manually. Being used to DOS fdisk, that bothered me [...]
July 13, 2011 at 8:01 am
[...] partitioning ended. On to the second day, I tried searching once more for cfdisk command and found this site (You can also check it out to learn how to partition your disk drive). I tried partitioning again [...]