3.1.2 Target Partition Device

You need to know, or find out, the device name for the hard disk or flash disk partition on which you want to install ttylinux. The device names for disk partitions are formed by appending a number to the device name of the corresponding disk. For example, if your disk device is /dev/hda, the device /dev/hda3 is the third partition on that disk. Numbers 1-4 are the primary partitions, extended partitions start at 5.

If you plan on installing onto a USB disk, or some other frequently moved disk device, use the instructions in section 2.4. The disk and partition devices used by this installation process will likely need to be different on a different computer. Because the installation disk and partition device numbers are subsequently used by the installed ttylinux, it will not boot, or possible not work right, when booted on a computer other than the computer on which the installation is performed.

Due to the combined space requirements of the 8 MB ttylinux file system and the over 2 MB ttylinux kernel, and considering some margin, the minimum partition size you can install ttylinux on and have it work is about 12 MB.

IDE disks use the same device names as given for IDE CD-ROM devices above. For SATA, the names are as follows:

Device Name	Description
/dev/sda	First SATA Disk Device
/dev/sdb	Second SATA Disk Device
/dev/sdc	Third SATA Disk Device
/dev/sdd	Fourth SATA Disk Device

Note that if you want to create a dual-boot setup with Windows and ttylinux on the same disk, a topic not covered here, you can't use the first partition /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 as your target partition, because that is where Windows needs to be installed to work.

Here are some examples of possible device names for your target partition:

Device Name	Description
/dev/hda1	First Primary Partition on Primary IDE Master
/dev/hdb5	First Extended Partition on Primary IDE Slave
/dev/sda2	Second Primary Partition on First SATA Disk
/dev/sdc6	Second Extended Partition on Third SATA Disk

Note that depending on the BIOS, booting might be possible only from the first two disks installed in the system.

What to do if your target disk is not partitioned yet? ttylinux includes the fdisk program that can be used to partition disks. For example, to partition a disk connected as master to the first IDE controller, use:

	fdisk /dev/hda

The user interface of fdisk is somewhat primitive, so be careful. If you haven't used it before, a good idea would be to search the Internet for instructions. The basic commands you may need are "d" to delete a partition, "n" to create a new partition, "p" to print the current partition table, and "w" to write the edited partition table to disk. You can also use "q" to exit fdisk without saving your changes.