2.1 Partitioning Concepts

Unfortunately, partitioning your disk is rather complicated. This is because there are interactions between many different systems that need to be taken into consideration:

• The BIOS or firmware - the program that is built into a ROM chip inside your computer, that does memory checks, etc. You can not (easily) change programs in this system. Examples of BIOS or firmware programs: AmiBIOS, Award, Phoenix, OpenFirmware. You will only have one of these programs.
• The boot loader - the program that allows you to select which operating system you want to use, and loads that operating system. Examples: LILO, GRUB, Yaboot, Quik. You may have more than one boot loader installed, especially if you have more than one type of operating system installed.
• The operating system (at the moment, this must be GNU/Linux) that runs Parted, and the other operating systems that you use.
• The file system types - the way the data stored on partitions. Examples of these are: ext2, fat32, hfs, reiserfs. You will often have partitions of of different file system types.

Parted suppports many combinations of BIOS, boot loader, operating system, and file systems, and will support more in the future. To further understand the roles of each, please see section 3. BIOSes and Firmware, section 4. Boot Loaders, section 5. Operating Systems, and section 6. File Systems supported by Parted.

This chapter describes how to use Parted, which is largely the same, no matter what systems you are using. You should read this chapter, then each of chapters on BIOSes, boot loaders, operating systems, and file systems. However, you only need to read the sections that are relevant to you. For example, if you are only using LILO as your boot loader, then you only need to read the introduction, and section 4.1 LILO: a bootloader for the Linux kernel.

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