im setting up partitions on my hd, using cfdisk and i have a few questions:

1. i want the main partition to be called hda1, but i also want my swap space to be at the beginning of the drive(its supposed to be faster). if i make the swap partition first, it gives me the option to write it at the beginning of the drive, but then my main partition is called hda2. if i make the main partition first, its called hda1 like i want, but i dont get to make the swap at the beginning of the drive.

2. what is a label? most of the partitions i create dont have a label, but the NTFS one i created using windows seems to have a label of "[^R]" whats the difference between a name and a label? what is a label?

3. is there a way i can change my hd name and label to what i want? maybe a more advanced partitioning tool than cfdisk that has more options or something?

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hda1 is a device ID and not a name. It refers to the 1st partition on the hard drive connected to the 1st IDE controller master drive.

hda - 1st IDE controller master
hdb - 1st IDE controller slave
hdc - 2nd IDE controller master
and so on...

An IDE drive can be divided into a maxium of 64 partitions. Partitions 1-4 are also called parimary partitions. In order to create more then 4 partitions a primary is designated as an extended paritition. In a nutshell an extended partition is a container for logical partitions. A logical partition has an ID >=5.

You can google for additional info on partitions.

It really does not matter what partition linux is installed to. Here is a simple partitioning scheme I use:
hda1 /boot (100mb)
hda2 - swap (512mb)
hda3 / (the remaining hard drive space)

A volume label is just a name you can assign to a partition. A volume label can be anything.

BTW what distribution are you trying to install?

im basically dual booting slackware and windows xp. my setup is like this:

hda1: ntfs

hdb1: Linux
hdb5: Swap (cfdisk automatically made it hda5 for some reason)

it works, but i was wondering about the drive label thing, what is it? is that what makes it say "c:" when im in windows? somebody told me that i could change the label using "makefs -L" but wouldnt that just rename the fs, or are the drive lable and the fs label the samething?

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Unless you change the drive mapping windows will automatically assign letters. The first recognized partition on the first recognized physical drive is c:, the first recognized partition on the next physical drive is d:, then all recognized logical drives will be assigned starting back with the first drive.

cfdisk automatically created an extended partition. hdb5 is a logical partition as I described in my previous post.

volume labels and fs names are not the same thing. I assume you are refering to a fs name as hdb1. hdb1 can not be changed. Again see my previous post for device IDs. A volume label is just a unique name you can assign to a partition.

An example of using volume labels with linux is via fstab. Redhat /fedora uses volume labels instead of device IDs in the fstab. This allows moving partitions around without needing to update the fstab.