4.19. Partitioning Your System

If you chose one of the three automatic partitioning options and did not select Review, skip ahead to Section 4.21, “Network Configuration”.

If you chose one of the automatic partitioning options and selected Review, you can either accept the current partition settings (click Next), or modify the setup using Disk Druid, the manual partitioning tool.

Note

Please note that in the text mode installation it is not possible to work with LVM (Logical Volumes) beyond viewing the existing setup. LVM can only be set up using the graphical Disk Druid program in a graphical installation.

If you chose to create a custom layout, you must tell the installation program where to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is done by defining mount points for one or more disk partitions in which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed. You may also need to create and/or delete partitions at this time.

Note

If you have not yet planned how to set up your partitions, refer to Chapter 26, An Introduction to Disk Partitions and Section 4.19.4, “Recommended Partitioning Scheme”. At a bare minimum, you need an appropriately-sized root partition, and a swap partition equal to twice the amount of RAM you have on the system. Itanium system users should have a /boot/efi/ partition of approximately 100 MB and of type FAT (VFAT), a swap partition of at least 512 MB, and an appropriately-sized root (/) partition.

Itanium, x86, AMD64, and Intel® 64 — Disk Druid's main partitioning screen.

Figure 4.16. Partitioning with Disk Druid on x86, AMD64, and Intel® 64 Systems

The partitioning tool used by the installation program is Disk Druid. With the exception of certain esoteric situations, Disk Druid can handle the partitioning requirements for a typical installation.

4.19.1. Graphical Display of Hard Drive(s)

Disk Druid offers a graphical representation of your hard drive(s).

Using your mouse, click once to highlight a particular field in the graphical display. Double-click to edit an existing partition or to create a partition out of existing free space.

Above the display, you can review the name of the drive (such as /dev/hda), its size (in MB), and its model as detected by the installation program.