[svlug] novice question

[Dan Martinez]

Estelle Baer wrote:

> Win2000 was cleared from an old laptop and SuSE 7.2, 
> Kernel 4.4.4, was installed.
	 ^^^^^

Whoa. Hook me up. ;-)


> Linux sees the BPHD. What precisely are the next commands which are
> required to mount the BPHD, assuming that the mount point is to be
> bphd? After the BPHD is mounted, it is intended to make a single
> partition on it.

Actually, you create the partition first, then mount it. Something like

fdisk /dev/bphd

should work. 


> (Is just one partition a good idea?)

Opinions differ on this. Separate partitions make backup easier and
prevent users from hosing the entire system by gobbling too much disk
space, among other things. If, on the other hand, you mis-estimate the
space you'll need for a given partition, you may be in for a rough
time, since resizing partitions isn't exactly a walk in the park.

Since it sounds like the BPHD isn't the primary disk for this machine,
you can *probably* get away with a single partition.

> What is the command to make the partition?

fdisk, as described above.

> After the partition is defined, are there other preparations
> required for this partition before it can be used?

mkfs, to make a filesystem on the newly-created partition. If you
created a single primary partition on /dev/bphd, you'd probably just
say

mkfs /dev/bphd1

here. Note the difference between this and fdisk: fdisk works on an
entire disk (/dev/bphd), while mkfs works on a partition (/dev/bphd1,
the first primary partition on /dev/bphd).

I'm not sure, but then, things are kind of hectic around here now.

Dan