Divide things up. As Rick explains this month, partitioning your hard drive is a popular way to get the best of both OS worlds. By Rick Cook echnically, partitioning your hard drive is not part of Linux, but if you're like most desktop users, you plan to share a computer between Linux and another OS, usually a version of Windows. That's usually where the fun starts.
Sharing makes partitioning the hard disk a practical necessity.
I came across recently involved what happens when you try to use a disk bigger than 8 GB or so on a Windows machine. My disk was 10 GB but until I installed Red Hat 5.2 only about 2 GB had been allotted to anything. When you do a workstation install, Red Hat wants to grab all the unallocated disk space for Linux, which in this case meant it created a small swap partition and a multigigabyte main Linux partition. I didn't mess with this on the theory that I could use Partition Magic to go in and resize the main Linux partition when I got the system fully installed. Of course as soon as that extra space was partitioned, my disk appeared as more than 8 GB, and Windows didn't like that at all.