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May 20, 2016
This article explains you the Disk management in Linux to understand the basic disk
management concepts. Lets discuss about the partitioning, naming conventions, partition
types, primary partitions, extended partitions, logical partitions, file systems.
In the next article, We explained you How to Create and Delete Partitions using fdisk in Linux.
Many new Linux admins create only two partitions / (root) and swap for entire hard drive. so all
other directories of linux like /usr, /var, /bin will be created under this /(root). Later on there may
be a need to create new partition for these directories or for other mount points, So admins
should be able to create a new partition manually using partition editors.
In Linux, partitions are represented by device files. These devices files are located in /dev. Some
example files listed below.
[root@node1 ~]# ll /dev/
Have a look on the first integer of two lines from the output, those starts with "b" for first two line
which are block devices (hda and sda). In Linux, all disks are represented as block devices only.
Naming Conventions
Linux maintains the naming conventions for IDE drives and SCSI Disks.
For example, lets assume that we have two IDE Drives with partitions as below.
This is all we have to know to deal with linux disk devices file.
Partition Types
1. Primary Partitions - The number of partitions was limited from the very beginning and we can
have only four partitions. These partitions are now called primary partitions.
2. Extended Partitions - The extended partitions is a way to overcome the limitation of four
primary partitions on a drive. If you want to have more than four partitions, You can put lots of
Partitions inside it.
3. Logical Partitions - A logical partition is a a partition that has been created inside of an
extended partition.
What is Filesystem?
A filesystem is the methods and data structures that an operating system uses to keep track of
files on a disk or partition; that is, the way the files are organized on the disk. The word is also
used to refer to a partition or disk that is used to store the files or the type of the filesystem.
Such a file system could be the linux standard ext3 file system, ext4 filesystem, linux swap
partitions or other filesystems. There is a numerical code associated with each things. For
example, the code for linux filesystem is 0x83 and linux swap is 0x82. Run "/sbin/sfdisk -T" to see
a list of partition types and their codes, execute /sbin/sfdisk -T
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