When setting up a partition with cfdisk, is the swap partition a primary or logical ?

swap should be automatically made as a logical partition (and should probably be put somewhere near the end of your harddrive)

Ok, heres what CFdisk looks like


Name Flags Part type FS type label size(MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 primary linux 10001.95
hda2 primary linux 9697.61
hda5 logical linux 304.34


[bootlable] [delete] [help] [maximize] [print] [quit] [type] [units] [write]


I want hda5 to be my swap, my friend said I need one primary part for my home directory and the other for everything else, I don't really understand this, how do I make the logical one a swap one and how do I chose which of the near 10000 mb ones to be the home and which to be the other stuff ? Very confused.

/bump, anyone know ?

Also, do i need to make one of them have the bootable flag, what does this do ???

Ok, i made the smaller one swap,but i have primary hda1 and primary hda2 how do i make one the home directory and the other one for the other stuff ? do I make one a linux exteneded or ??? I am very confused ? Would the linux extended be the home directory or the other stuff ?

It doesn't matter if swap is a primary partition or logical. In fact linux doesn't care what partitions it uses.

cfdisk just creates the partitions. When you get to the format step that is when you pick which partition you want to be home or swap etc.

To make things simpler just create three partitions (all primaries are ok):

swap 512 mb
/boot 50 mb
/ (root) The remaining disk space

BTW what distro are you trying to install? If trying Mandrake or RH they have auto partition selections.

slackware 9.0, I got it working now, I read the manual at www.slackware.com.