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The Disk Druid InterfaceThe Disk Druid screen, shown in Figure 2.6, contains a lot of information about your hard drives.
At the top of the screen, there's a section listing the Current Disk Partitions found on your hard drive. The middle of the screen is devoted to the Drive Summaries—the disk drives the installation program found. The bottom section lists the buttons and hot keys the program uses. All of the sections are described more fully in the following text.
Current Disk Partitions
This section details the partitions that already exist on your machine. Each listed
partition has several fields that are (left to right):
| Mount Point |
The name of the directory that you will mount the
directory under in Linux. Not putting anything in this field means that the partition will not be mounted. |
| Device | This field gives the device name of the partition. |
| Requested | This field shows the minimum size that was requested when the partition was defined. |
| Actual | This shows how much space is currently given to that partition. |
| Type | This field shows the type of partition. Commonly seen types are DOS, NTFS, Linux native, or Linux swap. You might also see that the partition has not been allocated yet. This is usually due to the fact that there isn't enough disk space for the minimum amount originally requested. |
Drive Summaries
The lines in this section represent the hard drives that are present in the machine. Each line has these fields:
| Drive | The hard drive's device name. IDE hard drives use the device names hdX, where X is a letter indicating which drive it is. SCSI hard drives are labeled by how they appear on the chain. The first drive found is sda, the second sdb, and so on. |
| Geom [C/H/S] | The hard drive's geometry as detected by Disk Druid. The geometry is separated by the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors that were found. Compare these numbers to what you wrote down from the BIOS. If they do not match up, it usually indicates that you need to use fdisk. |
| Total | This area reports the total amount of disk space the disk drive has. Compare this number with what you have already written |
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| in your inventory. | |
| Used | An area that indicates in Megabytes how much of the hard drive is currently allocated. |
| Free | This section shows how much of the hard drive is currently not allocated. |
| ##### | The final area is a bar graph giving a rough visual guide to how much disk space is still available on the drive. |
Disk Druid Commands
The bottom section contains the buttons that control Disk Druid. They can be used to Add, Delete, Change, Reset to the Beginning, or Finish the install.
Figure 2.7.
This pop-up menu lets
you specify the size
and type of your
partition.
The F1-Add option is used to add partitions. A pop-up menu, shown in Figure 2.7, appears when selected.
The fields in this pop-up are explained in Table 2.4.
Table 2.4. Explanation of the F1-Add pop-up menu.
| Menu Item | Explanation |
| Mount Point | Used to enter the partition's mount point. Remember that the entire space of the mounted hard drives are seen as sub-directories of the / partition. Therefore, you need to specify one Linux partition to be the root partition /. |
| Size (Megs) | Used to enter the minimal requested size of the partition. Unless changed, the minimum size is 1 meg. |
| Growable? | A check box to indicate that the size entered is a minimum or an exact size. If Growable is selected, the partition size tries to fit all available disk space on the drive. |
| Type | Used to choose the partition type to be used for the partition. This field is a highlighted scrollable section. |
| Allowable Drives | Another check box area that tells disk druid on which |
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| drives to try to create this partition. | |
| Ok | Selecting this button tries to create the partition. |
| Cancel | Selecting this button aborts the addition of a partition. |
The F2-Add NFS option is used to add NFS partitions. NFS partitions are network partitions and outside the scope of this section.
The F3-Edit option is used to change an already existing partition. The dialog box that appears enables you to edit various fields depending on whether the partition has been written to the disk already.
The F4-Delete option is used to remove the highlighted partition from the drive. A pop-up appears, asking to confirm this deletion.
The F5-Reset option is used to bring Disk Druid to the state it was before you made any changes. All changes that have been made are removed. Any data on the mount points also has to re-entered.
The Ok option is used to write changes to the disk drive. A confirmation pop-up appears, and if confirmed, the hard drives partition tables is written with the new data. The mount points that have been chosen are passed onto the installation program to define the filesystem layout.
The Cancel option bails you out of Disk Druid. Any changes made will be lost, and a pop-up dialog box is displayed, asking which step in the install should be to be done next.
Working with Disk DruidGet out the pad of paper that contains your plan for your hard drive so you can be sure you know which partitions you want to delete, and which you want to keep. Select the deleteable partitions and press F4 to delete them.
| CAUTION |
Remember that once you have removed these partitions and chosen the Ok option the information in these partitions is gone. |
Press F1 and you are presented with the Adding Menu. For the purposes of this
walkthrough you will have two partitions: / and swap. The first partition will be /. In the mount
point area type / and tab to the size field. For the purposes of this example, enter 250
megs (change this to fit with your earlier estimates). Select
Linux Native as the partition, double-check all of your entries, and then select Ok. Create the swap partition in the same
way, just be sure to select Linux Swap as the partition type and then choose Ok.