Partitions are initially set up during the installation
process. DiskDrake allows you, to some extent, to
resize your partitions, move them, etc. DiskDrake
can also deal with RAID devices and supports
LVM but we will not discuss these advanced uses
here.
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Warning |
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DiskDrake is very powerful and can therefore be a dangerous tool. Misuse could very easily lead to data loss on your hard drive. Because of this potential loss of data, you are strongly advised to take some protective measures before using DiskDrake:
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DiskDrake enables you to manage partitions on each physical hard drive on your machine, and also on removable drives: USB hard disks, keys, memory cards, etc. You can see as many tabs as hard drives your system has. Each tab is named after the Linux name for that drive (for example: sda for the first hard disk).
The window (see Figure 7.1, “DiskDrake's Main Window”) is divided into four zones:
Top. The structure of your hard drive. When you launch DiskDrake it will display the current structure of the drive. The display is updated as you make changes.
Right. A menu relevant to the partition currently selected in the above diagram.
Bottom. Buttons for executing general actions. See Section 7.1.2, “DiskDrake's Action Buttons”.
We will now review the actions available through the buttons at the bottom of the window, and then describe a practical use case.
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Note |
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You may not remember the content of existing partitions. Click on , you will be able to browse content of all your partitions |
We are now going to do a
little exercise to demonstrate one of the more useful features of
DiskDrake. Let us imagine that you decide to
use your machine as an FTP server and you want to
create a separate /var/ftp
partition in order to host
the FTP files. Note that doing this
step-by-step tutorial will actually modify the structure of your hard
drive.
Reboot the machine and press the Ctrl+Alt+F1 keys at the login screen.
This is what the current
/home
partition looks like before modification.
We are going to shrink this partition in order to create free space
for the new file system.
First of all, you need to unmount
the /home
partition by clicking on it and then
pressing the button.
The next step, as you may have
guessed, is to click on the button. A
dialog appears which allows you to choose the new size for the
/home
partition. Move the slider to reflect the
new size, then click on .
When resizing is done,
the graphic representation of your hard drive changes. The
/home
partition is smaller, and an empty space
appears. Click on the empty space and then on the
button. A dialog will let you choose the
parameters for the new partition. Set the size, choose the file system
you want to use (usually Journalized FS: ext3
) and
then enter the mount point for the partition, which in our example
will be /var/ftp
.
This is how our projected partition table now looks like.
The last step is to format (prepare to host files) the
newly created partition. To format the partition, click on its
representation in the partitions picture, then on the
button. Confirm the writing of the
partition table to disk, the formatting of the partition and the
update to the /etc/fstab
file. You may be asked
to reboot the computer to make changes effective.