Installation guide

The partitioning tool used by the installation program is Disk Druid. With the exception of cer-
tain esoteric situations, Disk Druid can handle the partitioning requirements for a typical install-
ation.
14.1. Graphical Display of DASD Device(s)
Disk Druid offers a graphical representation of your DASD device(s).
Using your mouse, click once to highlight a particular field in the graphical display. Double-click
to edit an existing partition or to create a partition out of existing free space.
Above the display, you can review the Drive name (such as /dev/dasda), the Geom (which
shows the hard disk's geometry and consists of three numbers representing the number of cyl-
inders, heads, and sectors as reported by the hard disk), and the Model of the hard drive as de-
tected by the installation program.
Finally, note which device is associated with /boot. The kernel files and bootloader sector will
be associated with this device. For most common cases, the first DASD or SCSI LUN will be
used, but for some unusual cases, this may not be the case. The device number will be used
when re-ipling the post-installed system.
14.2. Disk Druid's Buttons
These buttons control Disk Druid's actions. They are used to change the attributes of a parti-
tion (for example the file system type and mount point) and also to create RAID devices. But-
tons on this screen are also used to accept the changes you have made, or to exit Disk Druid.
For further explanation, take a look at each button in order:
• Edit: Used to modify attributes of the partition currently selected in the Partitions section.
Selecting Edit opens a dialog box. Some or all of the fields can be edited, depending on
whether the partition information has already been written to disk.
• RAID: Used to provide redundancy to any or all disk partitions. It should only be used if you
have experience using RAID. To read more about RAID, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise
Linux Deployment Guide.
To make a RAID device, you must first create software RAID partitions. Once you have cre-
ated two or more software RAID partitions, select RAID to join the software RAID partitions
into a RAID device.
14.3. Partition Fields
Above the partition hierarchy are labels which present information about the partitions you are
creating. The labels are defined as follows:
• Device: This field displays the partition's device name.
• Mount Point/RAID/Volume: A mount point is the location within the directory hierarchy at
which a volume exists; the volume is "mounted" at this location. This field indicates where
the partition is mounted. If a partition exists, but is not set, then you need to define its mount
14.1. Graphical Display of DASD Device(s)
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