Creating partitions under SUSE is fairly easy.

If you open YaST and go to the System page, you will see an option called "Partions" or "Partioning" (the former is the literal translation from the German on my machine).

Clicking on this will bring up a warning dialog that this option is only for experts. Ignore this and allow it to proceed. You should then be presented with the "Hard disk preparation: Expert mode" or similarly named dialog.

Here you will see a list of the hard disks and partitions on your system. Even if a partition isn't loaded under Linux, or it is a fallow partition (un-formatted), it should appear there.

The list on my current workstation is as follows:



You just need to select the partition from the list you want to work with.

Click on Edit and the details for the partition will appear. If the partition is already formatted, you can select to reformat it or you can assign it a mountpoint (see below).

If you want to split the partition into multiple partitions, you need to delete the partition first, then re-assign the space. You can specify several different formats for the partition.

You can specify the size of the partition in MB, GB or in the number of cylinders (sectors?).

You can specify the partition to not be formatted, if you just want to mount it, or you can specify which file system you want it to use. You get the following options:

Ext2 (old, legacy format without journalling)
Ext3 (newer version of Ext2 with journalling and ACL support)
Reiser (newer format with journalling, supposed to be very fast)
FAT (MS-DOS classic format, no security, no journalling, and no long filenames in the new version as Microsoft won the patent on that)
XFS (another journalling format with ACL support)
Swap (swap space for virtual memory for your system - if you have multiple versions of Linux installed, they can all share the same swap partition)

If you are going for a Linux partition, I would recommend Ext3 or ReiserFS. Reiser is pretty good, but certain applications can have problems with it - CyrusIMAP has problems handling mail transfer on some Reiser systems for example.

If you already have a Swap partition and you aren't running out of virtual memory, then you won't need this option.

If you are looking to share information with Windows either use FAT or Ext2/3 and use the Ext driver under Windows.

Mountpoints

This is where the new partition should appear in the system hierarchy. Common places would be in directories under /media or /mnt...

On the system above, I've actually installed the second hard disk under /data. This is non-standard, but a very handy and quick to find. This is also the beauty of *nix, you can put the partitions wherever you want them.

If we want to mount a Windows FAT partition for example, you can put it under /mnt/windows for example.

To do this, you need to assume root privileges and go to the directory, you can either do this with Konqueror or the Gnome browser in supervisor mode, or you can do it from the command line:



This creates the windows directory where the new partition will be mounted (mapped onto the existing hierarchy). Changing the access to 777 allows all users to access it. If you want to restrict access, you will need to change the owner and the access rights to the directory.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------