Use the arrow keys to navigate through cfdisk. The options at the bottom are fairly self-explainatory but I'll give a brief description of each one:
[Bootable]- marks a partition as 'bootable'. Note that only the first partition needs to be labeled as bootable IF YOUR BIOS CANNOT BOOT FROM BEYOND THE 1024 CYLINDER LIMIT OR YOU ARE USING NTLDR.
[Delete]- just as it implies it will delete- without question any partition you choose.
[Help]- take a guess.
[Maximize]- An option to maximize the usage of the partition. You will likely never need to use this option.
[Print]Not literally "send to printer" but print to file OR- for those of you that are curious print to screen-you can even choose the format.
[Quit]Just as it implies.
[Type]With this option you can MARK any partition as a certain format type. THIS DOES NOT FORMAT THE PARTITION!! That is a seperate process to be completed later AFTER writing your partition table AND confirming the re-read of your partition table which may involve a reboot.
[Units]Changes the format which your partitions are displayed. Your choices are Megabytes, Sectors or Cylinders. Stick with Megabytes unless you know what you are doing. It's much simpler.
*NOTE* A Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes. Therefor, in the above example /dev/hda10 is 3000 Mb OR 3Gigabytes.
[Write]- Commits your new partition table to the hard drive.
*REMEMBER* If you do not [Write] the partition table to disc nothing will be changed. When you do invoke the [Write] option cfdisk will tell you if it wrote successfully or not and if it succeeded in re-reading the partition table AFTER writing. If it fails to re-read the table you will need to reboot for the changes to take effect. If it successfully re-reads the partition table you should not need to reboot but if it makes you feel better by all means go ahead.
So what are you waiting for? Go ahead, start cfdisk, create and destroy partitions at will- JUST DON'T WRITE ANYTHING! and you'll be fine-just [Quit] cfdisk. Learn your way around the program, what it can and cannot do and how it does it. When you're happy with your partitions you've created then go a head and write the partition table to disc.