this process involves partitioning your hard drive.

Background

Partitioning your disk simply refers to the act of breaking up your disk
into sections. Each section is then independent of the others. It's
roughly equivalent to putting up walls in a house; after that, adding
furniture to one room doesn't affect any other room.

If you already have an operating system on your system (Windows 95,
Windows NT, DOS, etc.) and you want to install Debian GNU/Linux on the
same disk, you will probably need to repartition the disk. In general,
changing a partition that already has a filesystem on it will destroy any
information in that filesystem. Therefore, you should always make backups
before doing any repartitioning. Using the analogy of the house, you would
probably want to move all the furniture out of the way before moving a
wall or you risk destroying your furniture. Luckily, there is an
alternative for some users; see section 2.3.6 on page [*] for more
information.

At a bare minimum, GNU/Linux needs one partition for itself. You can have
a single partition containing the entire operating system, applications,
and your personal files. Most people choose to give GNU/Linux more than
the minimum number of partitions, however. There are two reasons you might
want to break up the filesystem into a number of smaller partitions. The
first is for safety. If something happens to corrupt the filesystem,
generally only one partition is affected. Thus, you only have to replace
(from the backups you've been carefully keeping) a portion of your system.
At the very least, you should consider creating what is commonly called a
``root partition.'' This contains the most essential components of the