“You got a new hard drive and attach it to your laptop/desktop but before you can use it, you need to partition and format the hard drive. This can be done with a series of easy steps. This is a small and easy tutorial which will show you how to use fdisk, one of very famous utility for disk partitioning.

Fdisk is the utility which we will be using for this example. Though there are other options also like parted/gparted and use of them depends totally on personal preference. For Fdisk, you need to provide the device name as an argument. For that the possible options could be:

/dev/hda
/dev/hdb
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb

Where

/dev/hd[a-h] stands for IDE disks
/dev/sd[a-p] stands for SCSI disks
/dev/ed[a-d] stands for ESDI disks
/dev/xd[ab] stands for XT disks.

Hard disks can be divided into one or more logical disks called partitions. The partition info is stored in the partition table which is present in the first 512 bytes of the disk.

By default, a hard drive can be divided into 4 partitions but you can have much larger number of logical partitions by dividing one of the primary partition. And only one of the partition can be sub-divided into logical partitions.” geekride.com