Partitions are initially set up during the installation
process. DiskDrake allows you, to some extent, to
resize your partitions, move them, etc. DiskDrake
can also deal with RAID devices and supports
LVM but we will not discuss these advanced uses
here.
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Warning |
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DiskDrake is very powerful and can therefore be a dangerous tool. Misuse could very easily lead to data loss on your hard drive. Because of this potential loss of data, you are strongly advised to take some protective measures before using DiskDrake:
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DiskDrake enables you to manage partitions on each physical hard drive on your machine, and also on removable drives: USB hard disks, keys, memory cards, etc. Below the file-system types you see as many tabs as hard drives your system has. Each tab is named after the Linux name for that drive (for example: sda for a SCSI or a SATA hard disk).
The window (see Figure 2, “DiskDrake's Main Window”) is divided into four zones:
Top. The structure of your hard drive. When you launch DiskDrake it will display the current structure of the drive. The display is updated as you make changes.
Left. A menu relevant to the partition currently selected in the above diagram.
Bottom. Buttons for executing general actions. See the section called “DiskDrake's action buttons”.
We will now review the actions available through the buttons at the bottom of the window, and then describe a practical use case.
Clicking on this button will clear all partitions on the current hard drive.
Displays a dialog allowing you to reload the partition table, use it to restore the partition table to the state it was in when you started custom partitioning.
This button allows you to access the expert mode functions (which are even more dangerous if you are not sure what you are doing). Reserved for experts.
We are now going to do a
little exercise to demonstrate one of the more useful features of
DiskDrake. Let us imagine that you decide to
use your machine as an FTP server and you want to
create a separate /var/ftp
partition in order to host
the FTP files. Note that doing this
step-by-step tutorial will actually modify the structure of your hard
drive.
Reboot the machine and choose → (or press the Ctrl+N keys) at the login screen.
This is what the current
/home
partition looks like before modification.
We are going to shrink this partition in order to create free space
for the new file system.
First of all, you need to unmount
the /home
partition by clicking on it and then
pressing the button.
The next step, as you may have
guessed, is to click on the button. A
dialog appears which allows you to choose the new size for the
/home
partition. Move the slider to reflect the
new size, then click on .
When this is done, you
will notice that the graphic representation of your hard drive has
changed. The /home
partition is smaller, and an
empty space appears on the right. Click on the empty space and then on
the button which appears. A dialog will
let you choose the parameters for the new partition. Set the size,
choose the file system you want to use (usually Journalized
FS: ext3
) and then enter the mount point for the partition,
which in our example will be /var/ftp
.
The last step is to format (prepare to host files) the
newly created partition. To format the partition, click on its
representation in the partitions picture, then on the
button. Confirm the writing of the
partition table to disk, the formatting of the partition and the
update to the /etc/fstab
file. You may be asked
to reboot the computer to make changes effective.