I m not sure if this is a right question to ask .

During the installation of the OS, installation sw does partitioning for you.
I m not quit sure if they have used parted or fdisk to partition the disk.
(If they are using fdisk then you can't make partition > 2Tb )correct me if i m wrong.Also it is recommended to use parted as fdisk is going to be deprecated .

Is this a recommended way to partition or we should use a standard utility to partition the disk first and then Use install CD/usb to install the OS.

Hope this is not a weird question asked here.

If you are installing, you might as well partition your drive in the installation program.

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But are they reliable?

What if you want to format disk > 2TB and installation program format it using fdisk? Are they intelligent enough to switch to parted.

I faced issues where Installation program not able to boot from partition > 2TB .

I personally don't always believe they are reliable. I've seen some that add additional swap space when you already have plenty. Also if someone wants to use logical volumes, by default and for example Ubuntu's installer will not recognize the LVM. They will get the job done but its best you learn about partitioning yourself so you can customize the partition as you see fit. but you won't learn partitioning overnight. you are correct about fdisk and no going over 2 terra bytes. now they have gdisk which is designed for GPT partitions. there is also GNU/parted for a partitioner but it isn't as accurate as disk or disk.

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The thing that confuses me everytime is why do they create new things rather than upgrading existing one.
For example it could have been solved by giving new version of fdisk like fdisk1 or something.

Now they have included gdisk and parted which is kind of redundant .
if gnu parted had issues then fix it rather than creating something new.


Not able to find gdisk installed in OEL or RHEL?
It is something i need to install separately.
GOD please make linux user friendly...

fdisk is a really old tool, it was introduced early at the beginning (at least I think so), before linux. fdisk exists on solaris, windows, mac.... The gnu-parted is a tool belongs to the linux world.

There is no recommended method for partitioning. It depends on your needs. Usually you may need a root, boot, user-home, swap, var, tmp and data partitions, but partially you can merge them.
If you want to protect your OS you will use a separate filesystem for your daily work, and will not allow to make disk full on /, /var.

Gdisk is pretty new. Soon most if not all distributions will have it. Also Grub2 is in the works for most distributions but it is also new and must go through testing in any distro that wants to include it

The reason some distributions auto format for you is because some partitioning schemes are not compatible with other distributions. If they tried to update existing partitions without your intervention, either the installs would fail for users not knowing what flags to put up or what sizes to make certain partitions. I still cannot get Slack ware to boot right with my GPT disk. And it also doesn't have GRub2 which is a must to boot from GPT partitions using EFI boot loaders.

As for RHEL or Oracle, yeah they won't have gdisk by default but you should be able to add it after the install through YUM or by getting it as an RPM.

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It would be interesting to know.
"What all majors Linux is taking to make it User Friendly?" Or its better to say "Linux is not meant to be use by dump administrator "

jschiwal posted that you should just follow the distro's installation program. I'd do that. If it fails then write back and maybe we can fix it. More likely than not, it will work if you board supports such a drive and the distro supports large drives.