GParted: Set your partitions

Nick Peers reveals how to divide up your hard drive using partitioning to protect your data and make Linux easier to work with.

network, or setting up independent partitions for temporary files, your swap file or even to run specific services like a web server. Whatever your needs, partitioning can play a crucial step in improving performance as well as protecting different parts of your drive from each other.

Partition types

Hard drives are partitioned according to a scheme. There are two main types of scheme: the older Master Boot Record (MBR), which is limited to the first 2TB of a hard disk, and the newer GUID Partition Table (GPT). In both cases, partition information is recorded physically in the first sector of the drive in a partition table – GPT drives also store this information at the other end of the drive in the last sector for redundancy purposes.

One of the limitations of the older MBR scheme is that it only supports a maximum of four partitions, although one of these can be an extended partition, which in turn can house multiple logical volumes, bypassing this limit. GPT doesn’t differentiate between primary and extended (logical) partitions and supports up to 128 partitions per drive.

GPT is designed in conjunction with modern UEFI firmware, but in some cases is backwards compatible with older legacy BIOS systems too. It’s compulsory if your drive is over 2TB in size, but ultimately which partition scheme you use typically depends on what you already have. For simplicity’s sake it’s best to stick with what’s already there, and if you’re planning to wipe the drive completely clean and install Linux from scratch, let your distro decide which scheme is best based on your current setup and stick with it post install.

In this tutorial we’ll cover partitioning using MBR, but the process is a similar one for GPT drives. We’re using Ubuntu