Managing Partitions

The partition of a Drive actually means to organize the hard drive into sections, which can then be formatted separately. Every Hard Drive requires atleast one partition.  Maximum partitions can upto 16 depending upon type of drive.

The different types of partitions on a Hard Drive are:-

1. Primary Partition:-
    Upto four primary partitions can be created on IDE or a SCSI hard drive.One primary partitions must be active; it should include a bootloader such as GRUB or the Linux Loader (LILO).

2. Extended Partition:-
    A primary partition can be converted into an extended partition which can further be subdivided into logical partitions depending upon your requirements.

3. Logical partitions:-
    An extended partition can be subdivided into logical partitions and there can be upto 11 logical partitions on a SCSI hard drive or upto 12 logical partitions on an IDE hard drive.

In Red Hat Linux installation process Disk Druid can be used to create different partitions but however it is available only during installation once installed you can only use fdisk utility.