Several varieties of partitioning programs have been adapted by Debian and Ubuntu developers to work on various types of hard disks and computer architectures. Following is a list of the program(s) applicable for your architecture.
- partman
-
Recommended partitioning tool in Ubuntu. This Swiss army knife can also resize partitions, create filesystems and assign them to the mountpoints.
- cfdisk
-
A simple-to-use, full-screen disk partitioner for the rest of us.
Note that cfdisk doesn't understand FreeBSD partitions at all, and, again, device names may differ as a result.
- mac-fdisk
-
Mac-aware version of fdisk.
One of these programs will be run by default when you select (or similar). It may be possible to use a different partitioning tool from the command line on VT2, but this is not recommended.
One key point when partitioning for Mac type disks is that the swap partition is identified by its name; it must be named “swap”. All Mac linux partitions are the same partition type, Apple_UNIX_SRV2. Please read the fine manual. We also suggest reading the mac-fdisk Tutorial, which includes steps you should take if you are sharing your disk with MacOS.
If you are installing onto a NewWorld PowerMac you must create a
special bootstrap partition to hold the boot loader. The size of this
partition must have at least 819200 bytes and its partition type must be
Apple_Bootstrap. If the bootstrap partition is
not created with the Apple_Bootstrap type your
machine cannot be made bootable from the hard disk. This partition
can easily be created by creating a new partition in
partman and telling it to use it as a “NewWorld
boot partition”, or in mac-fdisk using the
b command.
The special partition type Apple_Bootstrap is required to prevent MacOS from mounting and damaging the bootstrap partition, as there are special modifications made to it in order for OpenFirmware to boot it automatically.
Note that the bootstrap partition is only meant to hold 3 very small
files: the yaboot binary, its configuration
yaboot.conf, and a first stage OpenFirmware
loader ofboot.b. It need not and must not be
mounted on your file system nor have kernels or anything else copied
to it. The ybin and mkofboot
utilities are used to manipulate this partition.
In order for OpenFirmware to automatically boot Ubuntu the bootstrap
partition should appear before other boot partitions on the disk,
especially MacOS boot partitions. The bootstrap partition should be
the first one you create. However, if you add a bootstrap partition
later, you can use mac-fdisk's
r command to reorder the partition map so the
bootstrap partition comes right after the map (which is always
partition 1). It's the logical map order, not the physical address
order, that counts.
Apple disks normally have several small driver partitions. If you intend to dual boot your machine with MacOSX, you should retain these partitions and a small HFS partition (800k is the minimum size). That is because MacOSX, on every boot, offers to initialize any disks which do not have active MacOS partitions and driver partitions.
