Subtitles of the Movie

Exam objective 1.104.1 has a weight of 3, and verifies that candidates are able to configure disk partitions and then create file systems on media such as hard disks. This includes the handling of swap partitions. You need to be able to create file systems of different types. To do so, you work with one disk at a time. The first step is to divide the disk into partitions. To do this you address the disk by its device name. The device names are in the DEV directory. These special files are known as Device Nodes, and the node name tells you what kind of disk it is. HD is the designation for an IDE hard disk drive. The letters A through H specifies which drive, the numbers 1 through 20 specify a specific partition number on that drive. If there is no number the device node represents the entire drive. For example, HDB is the name of the entire second drive, and HDC3 is the name of the partition number 2 on the third drive. In the same way, letters SD are for SCSI drives. The two floppy disks are FD0, and FD1. These names can have more letters tacked on to the end of them to indicate the type of floppy drive. To divide a drive into partitions, you use fdisk with the device node name of the entire drive. This example uses the floppy disk. The M selection shows the list of choices, the menu. Using these commands, you can remove partitions, add partitions, charge partition types, whatever you need to do to get the configuration you want. And you have lots of types of partitions to choose from, look at this. By default, partitions created by fdisk have a type indicator of 83; a Linux partition. But you can use the T command to change it. In particular, if you create a partition to be used as swap space, you need to set it's type to 82. Floppies don't really need partitions, but here's how you would make the disk one large partition. Just enter N then answer their questions. It asks you for the partition number, the starting cylinder, the ending cylinder number, then you can look at the results of your work with the P command. This floppy is small, so it has been organized into a single partition. You can experiment all you want. Any changes you can experiment all you want. Any changes you make to the partition table only show up in memory. Nothing is written to disk until you've finished. You can always use delete to delete the partitions and start over, or you can save what you've got when you quit. Now you can create a file system. This is how you format the floppy as an ext2 file system. Ext3 doesn't work for floppies. Anyway, ext2 saves space, and things are a bit crowded on a floppy. You have several systems you can choose from. The original file system of Linux is Minix. It has some shortcomings. It has short file names and it's limited to 64 megabytes. Ext is an extension of the Minix file system. It has been completely replaced by a newer version, ext2. This is the high-performance version of the Linux file system. Ext3 is a version of ext2 that includes journaling. This one recovers very fast from power failure crashes. MSDOS is the old DOS file system with a limit of 8 character names. Vfat is the DOS file system with the addition of longer names. Xfs is a journaling file system that originally came from the IRC system, but it has been ported to Linux. The ReiserFS file system is a journaling file system found on several operating systems and on most Linux distributions, but not all. One other command I need to mention; if you set up a swap partition you need to define it as such with make swap. There. Now, the entire floppy disk is a swap partition. You need to get the feel of fdisk and how it works. Put in a floppy disk and divide it into four partitions. Then erase the partitions and split it into two. Try putting each of the file systems on a floppy disk. Why won't ext3 work?