<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 6:34 PM, Avi Greenbury <<a href="mailto:lists@avi.co">lists@avi.co</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> <div class="im">Linux Tyro wrote: > About how really partitioning works, in fact what exactly it is! </div>Basically, partitioning is a way of partitioning off a hard drive into separate areas. Much as you might divide up a warehouse into areas to keep distinct sorts of stock in, you can divide up hard drives in the same way. A hard drive is basically a large area of storage, which allows the computer to set bits of it to values either of 1 or 0. This, fundamentally, is how the files are stored on the system. But files have more than just data - they have things like names, and modified dates and permissions. We therefore tend to use a filesystem on a drive. A filesystem basically sets out a standard for the way files are to be stored on a drive - how the filename is stored and linked to the file, and how the permissions work. Common filesystems in Windows are NTFS and FAT, and Linux tends to use ext3 or ext4. The actual mechanics of how they work isn't particularly important, but the reason that, say, Windows needs a different partition to Linux us because Windows assumes NTFS's way of storing permissions and other file data, and Linux assumes ext's. [0] You would, therefore, put Windows on an NTFS filesystem in one partition, and Ubuntu on an ext filesystem in another. <div class="im"> > - What are these partitions sda1, 2, 3, ....how to know if ubuntu is > sda1 or sda2 or what and is it different from /home....? > - When I installed ubuntu 10.04 LTS, it got installed and that > partition is sda1/2/3/4/5 ...and upto where does this go...? </div>In contrast to Window's way of exposing hard drives with drive letters, Linux lets you 'mount' any drive at any directory. To 'mount' a drive is to make it available under a directory. If you had a big disk full of music, for example, you might wish to mount it under the directory 'music' in your home directory, then you just go into that directory to access the files on the disk. /dev/ is a directory in which devices are 'kept'. To mount a drive, you need to specify which device you want mounted (using its /dev address) and which directory you want it mounted on. /dev isn't reserved for disk drives, though. Disk drives generally start /dev/sd nowadays. /dev/sda is the first drive, /sdv/sdb the second and so on. The partitons are then themselves denoted by letters: /dev/sda1 is the first partition on the first drive, /dev/sda4 the fourth. You cannot actually *do* anything to the drives with these addresses - if you want to get at the files on them you need to instruct Linux to mount them first. Fortunately, it probably already has. I'm not aware of a graphical way to investigate what's mounted on the computer, though I'm sure there is one, but you can get an idea if you open a terminal (ctrl+alt+t) and then enter this text and hit enter: mount You will see several virtual drives mounted (ones with lines that don't start '/dev/') but you should be able to pick out the ones that are real-life drives. The lines are of the form: /dev/sda6 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) This is /dev/sda6 (that is, the sixth partition of the first drive) Mounted on / (that is, the 'root' directory, so it's where my operating system is) Of type ext3 (so the filesystem I'm using is ext3) The bits in the brackets are options for mounting, which are likely to be different, but are rather boring and irrelevant here anyway, <div class="im"> > -LVM yet another thing, is related with what...? It is (also) a > partition or what....? It is sda...? </div>LVM is rather more complicated, at least until you're happy with partitions and mounting and the like. Unless you've need to know and use it shortly, it would be beneficial to get quite comfortable with filesystems, partitions and the like before exploring LVM. Put simply, though, it provides a means of effectively having partitions whose sizes can be changed while they're in use - generally without LVM this is not possible. <div class="im"> > - Mounting a partition means what, what exactly we are going to do > with that partition after mounting it and before mounting, was it in > existence? </div>We speak of mounting drive at directories, and you make the contents of the drive appear as the contents of the directory. Any previous contents of that directory still exist, but are inaccessible while the drive is mounted.<a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users" target="_blank"></a> </blockquote></div> Thanks a lot to you. I have just started reading all this from the first word where you started. Thx again. -- Two atoms are walking along. Suddenly, one stops. The other says, "What's wrong?" "I've lost an electron." "Are you sure?" 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