LinuxQuestions.org - Viewing Partitions

The difference:

Code:

root@thinkpad:/home/zmk# df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda8              11G  3.8G  6.2G  38% /

/dev/sda7              29G  7.9G  19G  30% /home

/dev/sda6              30G  4.2G  25G  15% /usr/local

tmpfs                252M  36K  251M  1% /tmp

tmpfs                252M  20K  251M  1% /var/run

tmpfs                252M    0  252M  0% /dev/shm

root@thinkpad:/home/zmk# fdisk -l



Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes

240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10337 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sda1              1        9753    73732648+  5  Extended

/dev/sda2            9754      10337    4415040  12  Compaq diagnostics

/dev/sda5              1        133    1005417  82  Linux swap

/dev/sda6            134        4296    31472248+  83  Linux

/dev/sda7            4297        8265    30005608+  83  Linux

/dev/sda8            8266        9753    11249248+  83  Linux

root@thinkpad:/home/zmk#

df lists the free space of all mounted partitions, fdisk will edit/list ALL partitions (even if not mounted) without listing partitions that are on different disks or only in memory (like my various tmpfs mounts). If all you need is to know the layout of partitions, or the size of your drive, fdisk will suffice. If you want to know the amount of disk space available on each partition (something else altogether), df is what you need.

As for your past experiences with fdisk:
fdisk will accept partition sizes in meg. Instead of entering an ending cylinder number, enter +somenumberM. For example, a 256 meg partition would be +256M.

Knowing that, using fdisk is pretty simple. All commands are one letter long - just type the letter, press enter, and answer the very human-readable prompts. If you don't know which command to use, type m.

If you still can't stand fdisk, there's always cfdisk. cfdisk is identical to fdisk, except that it's curses based and provides a menu-like interface rather than prompts.

Quote:

FDisk is the reason why I could never get a Slackware install because I never could understand how big I should make each partition using that format...very confusing.

I usually just make the swap partition first, specifying a reasonable size, followed by the root partition of between 5-10G depending on the size of the drive. I then split the rest of the disk relatively evenly between /home and /usr/local.