Gentoo Linux AMD64 Handbook

Preparing the Disks
/usr is rather full (83% used) here, but once all software is installed, /usr doesn't tend to grow that
much. Although allocating a few gigabytes of disk space for /var may seem excessive, remember
that Portage uses this partition by default for compiling packages. If you want to keep /var at a more
reasonable size, such as 1GB, you will need to alter your PORTAGE_TMPDIR variable in /etc/
portage/make.conf to point to the partition with enough free space for compiling extremely
large packages such as OpenOffice.
Using fdisk to Partition your Disk
Important
If your environment will deal with partitions larger than 2 TB, please use the Using parted
to Partition your Disk [#parted] instructions instead. fdisk is not able to deal with larger
partitions.
The following parts explain how to create the example partition layout using fdisk. The example
partition layout was mentioned earlier:
Partition
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sda3
Description
Boot partition
Swap partition
Root partition
Change your partition layout according to your own preference.
Viewing the Current Partition Layout
fdisk is a popular and powerful tool to split your disk into partitions. Fire up fdisk on your disk (in
our example, we use /dev/sda):
Example 4.2. Starting fdisk
# fdisk /dev/sda
Once in fdisk, you'll be greeted with a prompt that looks like this:
Example 4.3. fdisk prompt
Command (m for help):
Type p to display your disk's current partition configuration:
Example 4.4. An example partition configuration
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 240 heads, 63 sectors, 2184 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 14 105808+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 15 49 264600 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda3 50 70 158760 83 Linux
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