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Partitionning examples

XXXX HOWTO, copyright (c) 2009 john Doe

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2Gb USB key

Preliminary

Most of the following works have to be made as root. Be very cautious not to key erroneous device names, not to trash your working system. Is it necessary to say this have to be done in an xterm, Konsole or full terminal?

It's a very bad idea to partition a mounted device. So after pluggin the device, run dmesg to see what is it's mount point (if any) and umount it.

fdisk

First start:

fdisk /dev/sdb 

Prints:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1817.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help):  

As you can read on the last line, fdisk have help included. Read it. Read it anytime, it's very short an any error could be bad.

Typing "p" let you see the actual partitionning:

Disk /dev/sdb: 2012 MB, 2012217344 bytes
47 heads, 46 sectors/track, 1817 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2162 * 512 = 1106944 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x04030201

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        1818     1964932    6  FAT16

Command (m for help):