Creating a new partition

Before we can build our new Linux system, we need to have an empty Linux partition on which we can build our new system. I recommend a partition size of around 750 MB. This gives you enough space to store all the tarballs and to compile all packages without worrying running out of the necessary temporary disk space. If you already have a Linux Native partition available, you can skip this subsection.

Start the fdisk program (or another fdisk program you prefer) with the appropriate hard disk as the option (like /dev/hda if you want to create a new partition on the primary master IDE disk). Create a Linux Native partition, write the partition table and exit the fdisk program. If you get the message that you need to reboot your system to ensure that the partition table is updated, then please reboot your system now before continuing. Remember what your new partition's designation is. It could be something like hda11 (as it is in my case). This newly created partition will be referred to as the LFS partition in this book.