LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Devices, Linux Filesystems, and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

Objective 1: Create Partitions and Filesystems

Disk drives and partitions

• IDE disks are known as /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd, and so on.

• SCSI disks are known as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, and so on.

• Three types of partitions:

  Primary

  Filesystem container. At least one must exist, and up to four can exist on a single physical disk. They are identified with numbers 1 to 4, such as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and so on.

  Extended

  A variant of a primary partition, but it cannot contain a filesystem. Instead, it contains one or more logical partitions. Only one extended partition may exist, and it takes one of the four possible spots for primary partitions.

  Logical

  Created within the extended partition. From 1 to 12 logical partitions may be created. They are numbered from 5 to 16, such as /dev/hda5, /dev/hda6, and so on.

• Up to 15 partitions with filesystems may exist on a single physical disk.

The root filesystem and mount points

• The top of the filesystem tree is occupied by the root filesystem. Other filesystems are mounted under it, creating a unified filesystem.

• /etc, /lib, /bin, /sbin, and /dev must be part of the root filesystem.

Partition and filesystem management commands

The following commands are commonly used to repair and manage filesystems:

fdisk [ device]

Manipulate or display the partition table for device using a command-driven interactive text interface. device is a physical disk such as /dev/hda, not a ...