Designing a Hard Disk Layout

In the previous chapter, we focused on runlevels and boot targets. We interacted with a Linux system running init and also systemd. We saw how to turn on a service, and we saw how to switch between runlevels and boot targets. We looked at the various start and stop scripts, and we also looked at the structure of a script.

This chapter focuses on creating partitions and segmenting a physical hard disk at the CLI. We will be particularly focusing on the usage of the fdisk utility and the parted utility. Then we will go through the steps to create, remove, and define the partition type as well as formatting the hard disk with the various mkfs commands. Finally, we will look at ways of mounting and unmounting a partition.

So, we will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Using the fdisk utility
• Using the parted utility
• Steps for formatting a hard disk
• Mounting and unmounting a partition