C.5. Debian Partitioning Programs

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.

partman

Recommended partitioning tool in Debian. This Swiss army knife can also resize partitions, create filesystems (format in Windows speak) and assign them to the mountpoints.

fdisk

The original Linux disk partitioner, good for gurus.

Be careful if you have existing FreeBSD partitions on your machine. The installation kernels include support for these partitions, but the way that fdisk represents them (or not) can make the device names differ. See the Linux+FreeBSD HOWTO.

cfdisk

A simple-to-use, full-screen disk partitioner for the rest of us.

Note that cfdisk doesn't understand FreeBSD partitions at all, and, again, device names may differ as a result.

One of these programs will be run by default when you select Partition disks (or similar). It may be possible to use a different partitioning tool from the command line on VT2, but this is not recommended.

Remember to mark your boot partition as Bootable.

C.5.1. Partitioning for 64-bit PC

If you are using a new harddisk (or want to wipe out the whole partition table of your disk), a new partition table needs to be created. The Guided partitioning does this automatically, but when partitioning manually, move the selection on the top-level entry of the disk and hit Enter. That will create a new partition table on that disk. In expert mode, you will then be asked for the type of the partition table. Default for UEFI-based systems is gpt, while for the older BIOS world the default value is msdos. In a standard priority installation those defaults will be used automatically.

[Note] Note

When a partition table with type gpt was selected (default for UEFI systems), a free space of 1 MB will automatically get created at the beginning of the disk. This is intended and required to embed the GRUB2 bootloader.

If you have an existing other operating system such as Windows and you want to preserve that operating system while installing Debian, you may need to resize its partition to free up space for the Debian installation. The installer supports resizing of both FAT and NTFS filesystems; when you get to the installer's partitioning step, select the option Manual and then simply select an existing partition and change its size.

While modern UEFI systems don't have such limitations as listed below, the old PC BIOS generally adds additional constraints for disk partitioning. There is a limit to how many primary and logical partitions a drive can contain.

On such old PC BIOS system, primary partitions are the original partitioning scheme for PC disks. However, there can only be four of them. To get past this limitation, extended and logical partitions were invented. By setting one of your primary partitions as an extended partition, you can subdivide all the space allocated to that partition into logical partitions. You can create up to 60 logical partitions per extended partition; however, you can only have one extended partition per drive.