Partitioning

Installing Gentoo - Partitioning

Linux has a very simple yet elegant tool to set up the partitions on your hard drive called fdisk. This is similar to the legacy dos-based fdisk.exe application, with the exception that it is very fast, supports almost all hard disk devices, and actually works.

Before you can start partitioning, you need to determine what the system recognized your hard drive as during bootup. As you are probably aware, there are two primary hard drive types: IDE and SATA. IDE hard drives have a wide ribbon cable about 2 inches wide and a standard power connector, where SATA drives have a smaller cable attachment and different type of power connector. To accommodate multiple hard drives, the Linux kernel enumerates devices using letters. The first drive found on a subsystem is designated as a, the next b, and so on.

Devices detected on the IDE subsystem are prefixed with hd, whereas devices on the SATA subsystem are prefixed with sd. If you are virtualizing Gentoo, chances are the virtual hard disk controller is IDE/ATA, so your virtual hard disk will be recognized as /dev/hda. Most new systems utilize SATA drives so that is what we will use as an example in this guide. The first device detected via a SATA connection would be designated /dev/sda.