Several varieties of partitioning programs have been adapted by Debian developers to work on various types of hard disks and computer architectures. Following is a list of the program(s) applicable for your architecture.
Recommended partitioning tool in Debian. This Swiss army knife can also resize partitions, create filesystems and assign them to the mountpoints.
Atari-aware version of fdisk.
Amiga-aware version of fdisk.
Mac-aware version of fdisk.
PowerMac-aware version of fdisk, also used by BVM and Motorola VMEbus systems.
One of these programs will be run by default when you select
tty2
) by pressing Alt
and F2 keys together, and manually type in the
name of the program you want to use (and arguments, if any). Then
skip the step in
debian-installer and continue to the next step.
If you will be working with more than 20 partitions on your ide disk,
you will need to create devices for partitions 21 and beyond. The next
step of initializing the partition will fail unless a proper device is
present. As an example, here are commands you can use in
tty2
or under Execute A Shell to add a device
so the 21st partition can be initialized:
# cd /dev # mknod hda21 b 3 21 # chgrp disk hda21 # chmod 660 hda21
Booting into the new system will fail unless proper devices are present on the target system. After installing the kernel and modules, execute:
# cd /target/dev # mknod hda21 b 3 21 # chgrp disk hda21 # chmod 660 hda21
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.