There is one additional step required when partitioning a hard drive for Red Hat Linux/SPARC. You must create the third partition of every disk as type Whole Disk spanning from cylinder 0 to the end of the disk. It shouldn't be used in any way, but it must exist. You can still create other partitions as you normally would.

Note that this partition will already exist on any disk that has been used under SunOS or Solaris. If you are partitioning a new disk, you can use fdisk's ``s'' command to create a standard disk label (which includes the whole-disk partition). If you don't care for the size of the other partitions created by ``s'', you can delete those partitions and recreate them with the sizes you want.

Because of the way disk partitioning is done, if the first partition on a disk starts at cylinder 0, and is used for swap space, it will overwrite the drive's partition table. This is a bad thing. Therefore, you have two options:

• Do not use the first partition for swap.

• Use the first partition for swap, but when you create it, start it at cylinder 1 instead of cylinder 0.

Either approach will save your drive's partition table.