Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 08-05-2008 Installation Manual page 174

All existing or suggested partitions on all connected hard disks are displayed in the list
of the YaST Expert Partitioner dialog. Entire hard disks are listed as devices without
numbers, such as /dev/hda or /dev/sda (or /dev/dasda). Partitions are listed
as parts of these devices, such as /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 (or /dev/dasda1,
respectively). The size, type, file system, and mount point of the hard disks and their
partitions are also displayed. The mount point describes where the partition appears in
the Linux file system tree.
If you run the expert dialog during installation, any free hard disk space is also listed
and automatically selected. To provide more disk space to SUSE Linux Enterprise®,
free the needed space starting from the bottom toward the top of the list (starting from
the last partition of a hard disk toward the first). For example, if you have three partitions,
you cannot use the second exclusively for SUSE Linux Enterprise and retain the third
and first for other operating systems.
Partition Types
TIP: IBM System z: Hard Disks
On the IBM System z platforms, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports SCSI
hard disks as well as DASDs (direct access storage devices). While SCSI disks
can be partitioned as described below, DASDs can have no more than three
partition entries in their partition tables.
Every hard disk has a partition table with space for four entries. An entry in the partition
table can correspond to a primary partition or an extended partition. Only one extended
partition entry is allowed, however.
A primary partition simply consists of a continuous range of cylinders (physical disk
areas) assigned to a particular operating system. With primary partitions only, you are
limited to four partitions per hard disk, because more do not fit in the partition table.
This is why extended partitions are used. Extended partitions are also continuous ranges
of disk cylinders, but an extended partition may itself be subdivided into logical parti-
tions. Logical partitions do not require entries in the partition table. In other words, an
extended partition is a container for logical partitions.
If you need more than four partitions, create an extended partition as the fourth partition
or earlier. This extended partition should span the entire remaining free cylinder range.
Then create multiple logical partitions within the extended partition. The maximum
156 Installation and Administration