<sect1 id="ch04-creatingpart">
<title>Creating a new partition</title>
<?dbhtml filename="creatingpart.html" dir="chapter04"?>

<para>It is possible to build LFS on only one partition - the partition
in which your original distribution is installed. While this is not
recommended for your first LFS installation, it may be useful if you
are short on disk space. If you feel brave, take a look at the
<emphasis>Install LFS next to existing systems on the same
partition</emphasis> hint at <ulink
url="&hints-root;lfs_next_to_existing_systems.txt"/>.</para>

<para>Before we can build our new Linux system, we need an empty
Linux partition where we can build it. We recommend a partition size
of at least 1 GB. This provides enough space to store the tarballs and
compile all of the packages. You will probably need more space if you
intend to install additional software and use the LFS system as your
primary Linux system. If a Linux native partition is already available,
this subsection can be skipped.</para>

<para>Since your system memory can only hold a limited amount of data
at one time, we recommend that disk space be set aside for swap files.
A swap file is a place where items in memory may be stored until they
are called for. This disk space may be shared between your host system
and your LFS system. If you already have a swap partition, then you
probably don't need to create another one. Otherwise, you should create
a swap partition via an fdisk program. Regardless, you need to remember
the designation of the swap partition (such as hda2) as it will be needed
when we create the <filename>/etc/fstab</filename> file.</para>

<para>The cfdisk program (or another fdisk-like program) should be
started with the appropriate hard disk as the argument (like /dev/hda
if a new partition is to be created on the primary master IDE disk).
Using this program, create a Linux native partition. Please refer to
the documentation of your fdisk program (the man pages are often a
good place to start) for information about creating Linux native
partitions and writing partition tables.</para>

<para>The designation of your new partition should be remembered.
It might be something similar to hda11. This newly created partition
will be referred to as the LFS partition in this book.</para>

</sect1>
