HD Install :: Booting from HD partition

That's up to you on how you use your hard drive space, and so is your backup and myDSL partition.

I'd suggest using that space for those 2 purposes.

You won't be able to use it if it's not partitioned and formatted, and you won't be able to partition it if you are already booted into the hda1 system (the disk must be unmounted in order to partition it). So you might as well finish the task before installing.

I know with my laptop I had problems using cfdisk to do the partitioning so I used fdisk (there is also sfdisk but I haven't used that) to do the partitioning and it worked. Now cfdisk sees the hard drive. Until you get the partition table written you won't be able to format anything so try one of the other tools to see if you can set the partitons first then you can format them. You can use all primary partitions if you want. The only difference (that I see anyway) is that you can only have 4 primary partitions while you can have more logical partitions. Since you only want three partitions using primary is fine. You need that partition table written first though.

original here.