Did we tell you to back up your disks? Here's your first chance to wipe
out all of the data on your disks and your last chance to save your old
system. If you haven't backed up all of your disks, remove the floppy from
the drive, reset the system, and run backups.

Partition a Hard Disk

Whatever the ``Next'' menu selection is, you can use the down-arrow key to
select ``Partition a Hard Disk.'' Go ahead and do this now, then press
Enter.

The ``Partition a Hard Disk'' menu item presents you with a list of disk
drives you can partition and runs a partitioning application called
cfdisk. You must create at least one ``Linux native'' (type 83) disk
partition, and you probably want at least one ``Linux swap'' (type 82)
partition, as explained in later in this section.

You will now create the partitions that you need to install Debian. For
this example, the assumption is that you are partitioning an empty hard
disk.

The boot partition must reside within the first 1,024 of cylinders of your
hard disk (see section 2.3.3 on page [*]). Keeping that in mind, use the
right-arrow key to highlight the ``New'' menu selection, and then press
Enter. You will be presented with the choice of creating a primary
partition or a logical partition. To help ensure that the partition
containing the boot information is within the first 1,024 cylinders,
create a primary partition first. This primary partition will be your
``Linux native'' partition.