[Techtalk] Re: Making room for Oracle

[Beth Johnson]

On Thu, 2002-11-28 at 20:26, Arashi wrote:

>  My hard disk has been cut up into /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2... /dev/hda7.
>  Are those directories or partitions?  My /home is located on hda6. 
> How can I find out what the others are for?

Hi, I didn't see anyone really answer these questions, so I'll do that.

The stuff in /dev refers to devices, actual physical things.  The "hd"
stands for hard disk, and they are ordered from "a" and on starting with
the master disk on your primary IDE channel.  The numbers refer to
partitions on that physical disk.  Any number higher than 4 is residing
on an extended partition.  (Because Linux doesn't like more than four
regular partitions on a disk, anything beyond that is nested in
partition 4.)

The /home, /, /boot or whatever you have are directories, or in the case
of /, the top level directory.  These can be on the same partition or on
different ones.

The file /etc/fstab tells the kernel how the information from the
devices in /dev fits into the filesystem under /.

Hope this helps,
Beth
-- 
  /\/\    Beth Johnson
 / o o\   Cosmic Wonderer
( / ^^\)  Springfield, MA USA
 \ M_M/   "Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish--
           you have to handle it with care."--Lao Tzu