just got damn small linux and am a complete and total noob
 

alright, I just got damn small linux to work on a fairly ancient computer. I have booted it through a live CD and it is working great, now I am just trying to install it.
The windows 98 on this machine is damaged, so I can only really boot DSL. I am trying to install DSL to the hard drive and it is asking me to partition.
What I would like to know is how to either partition a hard drive or format it. I really want to format it and have it all to myself, I don't care much about the content on the drive. Can anyone help me?
Thanks alot for reading this
Jeff

Is there only one partition on the drive? If so, just select that partition as the one to install DSL, and it will be re-formated during the install process.

If there are more that one partition, you could run DSL as a liveCD and use one of the partitioning tools such as gparted or cfdisk to delete all partitions, then create one partition on the entire disk. Then, during installation, it will be formated.

You have to decide which filesystem you want: ext2 (Linux, non-journaled), ext3 (Linux, journaled. Makes recovery from data corruption from improper shutdown easier), reiserFS (Linux, also journaled, but a bit more difficult to work with according to some folk). There are others, but those are the most popular.

Conversion from ext2 to ext3 is very easy. Converting from or to reiserFS is more difficult.