difference beween swap and data partition...???

[jimmy786]

plz help me..these r rather subjective topics....
what's the difference between data and swap partitions..how we gonna recongnise these and how fstab and fdisk r related t these..please provide me some fair ideas regarding these ..every time i follow a book i found it rather confusing...
abd what is root partition and how it differs from the boot partition..give me a fair idea regarding these...thanks in advance

[daark.child]

Swap is virtual memory which is used in conjunction with your systems ram. Fdisk is a disk partitioning utility that can also be used to view the partition layout of a disk. /etc/fstab is a file that contains info about the devices (usually hard drives, floppy drives and optical drives) on your system and their mount points. The boot partition contains the linux kernel and other support files (e.g. bootloader config files), that help Linux start up. The root partition can refer to two things, namely the top level directory in a Unix filesystem usually referrd to with a forward slash (/). The root partition can also refer to the admin users home directory.

What book are you using? I would recommend you read a book simply titled Unix for all the basics about Unix and Linux.