# &debian; Partitioning Programs

Several varieties of partitioning programs have been adapted by &debian; developers to work on various types of hard disks and computer architectures. Following is a list of the program(s) applicable for your architecture.

`partman`

- Recommended partitioning tool in &debian;. This Swiss army knife can also resize partitions, create filesystems (format in Windows speak) and assign them to the mountpoints.

`fdisk`

- The original Linux disk partitioner, good for gurus.

  Be careful if you have existing FreeBSD partitions on your machine. The installation kernels include support for these partitions, but the way that `fdisk` represents them (or not) can make the device names differ. See the Linux+FreeBSD HOWTO.

`cfdisk`

- A simple-to-use, full-screen disk partitioner for the rest of us.

  Note that `cfdisk` doesn't understand FreeBSD partitions at all, and, again, device names may differ as a result.

`atari-fdisk`

- Atari-aware version of `fdisk`.

`amiga-fdisk`

- Amiga-aware version of `fdisk`.

`mac-fdisk`

- Mac-aware version of `fdisk`.

`pmac-fdisk`

- PowerMac-aware version of `fdisk`, also used by BVM and Motorola VMEbus systems.

`fdasd`

- &arch-title; version of `fdisk`; Please read the fdasd manual page or chapter 13 in Device Drivers and Installation Commands for details.

One of these programs will be run by default when you select Partition disks (or similar). It may be possible to use a different partitioning tool from the command line on VT2, but this is not recommended.

Remember to mark your boot partition as Bootable.

One key point when partitioning for Mac type disks is that the swap partition is identified by its name; it must be named swap. All Mac linux partitions are the same partition type, Apple_UNIX_SRV2. Please read the fine manual. We also suggest reading the mac-fdisk Tutorial, which includes steps you should take if you are sharing your disk with MacOS.

&partition-x86.xml; &partition-powerpc.xml;