Creating A Partition - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 System Administration Manual

Tip
To select a different device without having to restart parted, use the select command
followed by the device name such as /dev/sda. Then, you can view its partition table or
configure it.

12.1.2. Creating a Partition

Warning
Do not attempt to create a partition on a device that is in use.
Before creating a partition, boot into rescue mode (or unmount any partitions on the device and turn off
any swap space on the device).
Start parted, where /dev/sda is the device on which to create the partition:
parted /dev/sda
View the current partition table to determine if there is enough free space:
print
If there is not enough free space, you can resize an existing partition. Refer to
"Resizing a Partition"
for details.
12.1.2.1. Making the Partition
From the partition table, determine the start and end points of the new partition and what partition type
it should be. You can only have four primary partitions (with no extended partition) on a device. If you
need more than four partitions, you can have three primary partitions, one extended partition, and
multiple logical partitions within the extended. For an overview of disk partitions, refer to the appendix
An Introduction to Disk Partitions in the Installation Guide.
For example, to create a primary partition with an ext3 file system from 1024 megabytes until 2048
megabytes on a hard drive type the following command:
mkpart primary ext3 1024 2048
Tip
If you use the mkpartfs command instead, the file system is created after the partition
is created. However, parted does not support creating an ext3 file system. Thus, if you
wish to create an ext3 file system, use mkpart and create the file system with the mkfs
command as described later. mkpartfs works for file system type linux-swap.
The changes start taking place as soon as you press Enter, so review the command before
executing to it.
Creating a Partition
Section 12.1.4,
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