At this point, you need to choose which partition(s) will be used for the installation of your Mandriva Linux system. If partitions have already been defined, either from a previous installation of GNU/Linux or by another partitioning tool, you can use existing partitions. Otherwise, hard drive partitions must be defined. To create partitions, you must first select a hard drive. You can select the disk for partitioning by clicking on hda for the first IDE drive, hdb for the second, sda for the first SCSI drive and so on. To partition the selected hard drive, you can use these options: Clear all: this option deletes all partitions on the selected hard drive Auto allocate: this option enables you to automatically create ext3 and swap partitions in the free space of your hard drive More: gives access to additional features: Save partition table: saves the partition table to a floppy. Useful for later partition-table recovery if necessary. It is strongly recommended that you perform this step. Restore partition table: allows you to restore a previously saved partition table from a floppy disk. Rescue partition table: if your partition table is damaged, you can try to recover it using this option. Please be careful and remember that it doesn't always work. Reload partition table: discards all changes and reloads the partition table that was originally on the hard drive. Removable media auto-mounting: unchecking this option will force users to manually mount and unmount removable media such as floppies and CD-ROMs. Wizard: use this option if you wish to use a wizard to partition your hard drive. This is recommended if you do not have a good understanding of partitioning. Undo: use this option to cancel your changes. Toggle between normal/expert mode: allows additional actions on partitions (type, options, format) and gives more information about the hard drive. Done: when you are finished partitioning your hard drive, this will save your changes back to disk. When defining the size of a partition, you can finely set the partition size by using the Arrow keys of your keyboard. Note: you can reach any option using the keyboard. Navigate through the partitions using Tab and the Up/Down arrows. When a partition is selected, you can use: Ctrl-c to create a new partition (when an empty partition is selected) Ctrl-d to delete a partition Ctrl-m to set the mount point To get information about the different file system types available, please read the ext2FS chapter from the Reference Manual. If you are installing on a PPC machine, you will want to create a small HFS bootstrap partition of at least 1MB which will be used by the yaboot bootloader. If you opt to make the partition a bit larger, say 50MB, you may find it a useful place to store a spare kernel and ramdisk images for emergency boot situations.