I am starting from scratch on a old PC. It has 3 hds, none of which has any useful data on it, so I want to clear all 3 and install Slackware on the box. I booted with bootdisk and deleted all of the partitions w/ fdisk. I tried to use CFdisk but it said "Cannot open disk drive". So I went into fdisk to do the partitioning. When I went to add a new partition, at the step where it asked me what size I want the partitions, the numbers it gave me for defaults were significantly lower than on the first machine I installed Linux on. If I remeber correctly, the last time I used fdisk (on a diff. machine) the numbers were in the 10's of thounsands range. Now they were under 1000. Granted, the HDs in the machine Im working on are probably smaller than the other's, I don't think the numbers should be that much lower. Here's a summary of what fdisk -l gave me, can someone please help me select the proper size for my partitions? (btw, I have about 72mb of RAM)

I have 3 hds: hdg, hdf, hde.

----------------------------------------------------------------

HDG: 6510 MB

255 heads, 63 sectors per track, 791 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

----------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------

HDE: 2111 MB

16 heads, 63 sectors per track, 4092 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

----------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------

HDF: 1083 MB

64 heads, 63 sectors per track, 525 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 = 2064384 bytes

----------------------------------------------------------------

When I tried to add partitions, the defaults they gave me for sizes are as follows:

HDG: 1-791
HDF: 1-525
HDE: 1-4092

What should my partition layout look like? How big should each part. be?

HELP!!

well, how do you want your partitions set up? the numbers you are seeing are correct, they are displaying the number of cylinders for each drive how did you start cfdisk? did you use cfdisk /dev/hdg for opening hdg? if not then that is your problem you can change the display unit to secturs by passing u to fdisk

Okay, the sectors vs cylinders makes sense. For some reason, last time I installed, it must have been displaying sectors. Can you provide me with help setting up the partions as follows:

From the OneAndOnlySM

also, i normally setup a system with /boot, /, and SWAP (some people also like to set /home apart, but i don't do this since i never know how much space i will use in my home directory)

so, in cfdisk (easier to use than fdisk), create a new partition for 100 megs at the beginning of free space (set it's id to Linux, i think number 85); create a partition that is 2 times the size of your ram (but make it no more than 512 megs) at the end of your harddrive (label it linux swap); finally, create a partition that fills the rest of your harddrive (label it Linux as well)

also note: make the 100 meg partition primary and the others logical (save headaches later on if you install other distros)

now, when slackware installer asks for swap, make sure it chooses /dev/hdx6; when asked for which partition will be root, choose /dev/hdx5, and when asked to mount other partitions, choose /dev/hdx1 and mount it under /boot

Thanks

personally, i would make your 1 gig drive into swap, unless you need the space, id just make the whole drive swap this will allow your computer to use swap space while accessing programs and speed up your computer once your ram is full as far as how big you want your partitions simply take the number of cylinders or sectors and make a proportion with the amount of space you want ie: 100/6510=x/791 solve your proportion using cross multiplication, and you ahve the correct value, follow the guide and make 100 mb on your first 6 gig drive the rest as a linux fs i prefer reiserfs then your second drive as a linux fs and your 1 gig drive as swap

fdisk is super-lame.....
you really should be using cfdisk