Partition and format the disk

[linuxhelp10]

Good morning,

I want to restore a server on laptop with mondorescue. So when I tried to boot from the iso image of mondorescue on laptop, it errored out saying the /dev/hda1 is tiny and I tried to bump that then it errored out as mountlist is invalid.

so then i tried to partition and format the drive. so while i am trying to format the disk on the laptop, what r the exact steps i need to follow. new to linux and please help me the steps to partition and format the 320 gig drive.

thank you

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Use PartedMagic or GParted LiveCDs to manage partitions. Both have Graphical Interface.
I prefer PartedMagic because it has a lot of other tools and its one of the must have LiveCDs.

[rokytnji]

I second that on the Prted Magic Iso. I just installed a second hand hardrive to my motorcycle shop desktop.

It came from the salvation army store (it was cheap) and had a bunch of Dell stuff on it. I was able to format it into multiple partitions so as to use part of it for storage, another part for a Puppy Linux Partition. All without messing with my other hardrive that has another dual boot operating systems installed.

I had another 250 gig Hardrive I also picked up from Salvation army. I used a external USB enclosure to hook it up and booted up Prted Magic ISO to check it out. This drive was noisy. Parted reported NTFS partition with a warning. I was able to split up the Drive into 2 125 gig partitions as Fat32. I don't know how long this drive will last because of the noise. It was only $2.00 investment so no big loss if it goes out. But Prted magic has a lot of tools to fix software related problems with hardrives. And so far that noisy hard drive works as a non essential backup drive.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Parted Magic is one of the best utility disks available and it's a free download, so like the others I very highly recommend it, as it has never failed me.

[linuxhelp10]

Thank you devils and rokytnji. All i need to do is download the pmagic4.8 and burn to the dvd and boot the laptop with that dvd? and i will be able to partition?

Did any one do mondorestore?

[oz]

All i need to do is download the pmagic4.8 and burn to the dvd and boot the laptop with that dvd? and i will be able to partition?

That's correct... burn it to disk as an image, then boot with the new disk. You'll be given an easy to use GUI to do your partitioning/formatting.

[linuxhelp10]

I booted the laptop with the pmagic and now the dvd ejected and then the looged in to the partedmagic free partitioning tool desktop. I checked in the terminal by typing fdisk /dev/sda and hot p, got back

/dev/sda: 320.1 GB
Device boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 38913 312568641 83 Linux

So whats next?

[oz]

Check this documentation from the Parted Magic website for using Gparted, the GUI partitioning tool:

Using GParted

You can also partition from the command line, but the GUI method will probably be easier unless you know what you are doing.