Hello everyone

i dont know a thing about partitioning.
with a 80GB hard disk, in 4 partitions, out of which the 1st,3rd and 4th are in work, the 2nd i have spared for Red hat.
I downloaded Ranish Partition Manager, but couldnt understand.

Anybody can help me with this ?
I'd be glad.


Thanks

As beginner I would delete the 2nd and let the installer auto partition the free space for you. Its actually best to have 2 partitions, root and a swap. A swap partition is similar to windows virtual memory swap file. Auto partitioning will create three, boot, root (/) and a swap.

Go read up on the installation documentation at Redhat's website.

Drive partition 101:
You can create 4 primary partitions. However you can have up to 16 total partitions. To create additional partitions one of the primaries is an extended partitions and then you create a logical partition. In simple terms an extended partitions is a container for logicals.

Well Guru, you have said everything in pro language.
However, i will have to do some reading and do catchin up.
Thanks anyway.

You can have up to 63 total usable partitions; 3 primary & 60 logical. This is for IDE only.
For SCSI the limit on partitions is 15.
Examples:

Primary partitions only. Note only 4 are allowed.
hda: Primary master ide device
|-hda1: primary partition 1
|-hda2: primary partition 2
|-hda3: primary partition 3
\-hda4: primary partition 4

Logical partitons being used to get around 4 primary partition limit:
hda: Primary master ide device
|-hda1: primary partition 1
|-hda2: Once primary, now extended, carrying logical partitions
| |-hda5: Logical partition 1
| |-hda6: Logical partition 2
| \-Upto 60 logical ones if you want.
|-hda3: primary partition 3
\-hda4: primary partition 4


See the Partition Howto for more info:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/index.html