Installation guide

28 Chapter 4. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Caution
It is always a good idea to back up any data that you have on your systems. For example, if you are
upgrading or creating a dual-boot system, you should back up any data you wish to keep on your
hard drive(s). Mistakes do happen and can result in the loss of all your data.
Tip
If you have a RAID card, be aware that some BIOSes do not support booting from the RAID card. In
cases such as these, the /boot/ partition must be created on a partition outside of the RAID array,
such as on a separate hard drive. An internal hard drive is necessary to use for partition creation with
problematic RAID cards.
A /boot/ partition is also necessary for software RAID setups.
If you have chosen to automatically partition your system, you should select Review and manually
edit your /boot/ partition.
To review and make any necessary changes to the partitions created by automatic partitioning, select
the Review option. After selecting Review and clicking Next to move forward, the partitions created
for you in Disk Druid appear. You can make modifications to these partitions if they do not meet your
needs.
Click Next once you have made your selections to proceed.
4.16. Partitioning Your System
If you chose automatic partitioning and did not select Review, skip ahead to
Section 4.18 Network Configuration.
If you chose automatic partitioning and selected Review, you can either accept the current partition
settings (click Next), or modify the setup using Disk Druid, the manual partitioning tool.
If you chose to partition manually, 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 Appendix D An Introduction to Disk Partitions and
Section 4.16.4 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.