I've just got a new machine thats running Redhat 9 and the 2 SCSI disks are partitioned as follows

Disk /dev/sda: 36.7 GB, 36748945408 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4467 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 267 2040255 82 Linux swap

Disk /dev/sdb: 36.7 GB, 36748945408 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4467 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 4467 35881146 83 Linux

As you can see, a large portion of sda is not being used plus I don't like /var and /tmp being in / (sdb1)

I'd like to make sda4 an extended partition with 2 logicial partitions to holed /var and /tmp (ext2 - 2 GB each (sda5 and sda6)) and used whats left for sda3 as a data disk.

I've being reading the Linux Partition HOWTO and my brains decided to give up


Can someone help me out with the maths
(I want to understand the calculations, not just be given the answer) ,
plus how big is the swap (considering I have 4GB of RAM) ?

Thanks

Leigh

With fdisk there's no need to specify the partition size in cylinders, you can use something like +4000m, or use cfdisk, an easier tool.
As for the swap, you're probably fine without one(depends on what you will be running), but I'd make a 256mb swap anyway just in case.