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  <sect2 arch="x86"><title>Partitioning for &arch-title;</title>
<para>

If you are using a new harddisk (or want to wipe out the whole partition table
of your disk), a new partition table needs to be created. The <quote>Guided
partitioning</quote> does this automatically, but when partitioning manually,
move the selection on the top-level entry of the disk and hit &enterkey;.
That will create a new partition table on that disk. In expert mode, you will
then be asked for the type of the partition table. Default for UEFI-based systems
is <quote>gpt</quote>, while for the older BIOS world the default value
is <quote>msdos</quote>. In a standard priority installation those defaults
will be used automatically.

</para><note><para>

When a partition table with type <quote>gpt</quote> was selected (default for
UEFI systems), a free space of 1 MB will automatically get created at the
beginning of the disk. This is intended and required to embed the GRUB2
bootloader.

</para></note><para>

If you have an existing other operating system such as Windows and
you want to preserve that operating system while installing &debian;, you may
need to resize its partition to free up space for the &debian; installation.
The installer supports resizing of both FAT and NTFS filesystems; when you
get to the installer's partitioning step, select the option
<guimenuitem>Manual</guimenuitem> and then simply select an existing
partition and change its size.

</para><para>

While modern UEFI systems don't have such limitations as listed below,
the old PC BIOS generally adds additional constraints for disk
partitioning.  There is a limit to how many <quote>primary</quote> and
<quote>logical</quote> partitions a drive can contain.

</para><para>

On such old PC BIOS system, <quote>primary</quote> partitions are the original partitioning scheme for PC
disks.  However, there can only be four of them.  To get past this
limitation, <quote>extended</quote> and <quote>logical</quote> partitions were invented.  By
setting one of your primary partitions as an extended partition, you
can subdivide all the space allocated to that partition into logical
partitions.  You can create up to 60 logical partitions per extended
partition; however, you can only have one extended partition per
drive.

</para>
  </sect2>
