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With your current *nix partitioning tools, repartition the hard drive as needed, creating at least one filesystem plus swap. You need around 506MB of space available for a console only install.
Next, create file systems on the partitions. For example, to create an ext3 file system on partition
/dev/sda6 (that’s our example root partition):
# mke2fs -j /dev/sda6
To create an ext2 file system instead, omit -j.
Initialize and activate swap (substitute the partition number for your intended Ubuntu swap partition):
# mkswap /dev/sda5
# sync
# swapon /dev/sda5
Note: Instead of using a dedicated swap partition, you may omit the swap partition setup here and later just use a swap file instead.
Mount one partition as /mnt/ubuntu (the installation point, to be the root (/) filesystem on your new system). The mount point name is strictly arbitrary, it is referenced later below.
# mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
# mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/ubuntu
Note: If you want to have parts of the filesystem (e.g. /usr) mounted on separate partitions, you will need to create and mount these directories manually before proceding with the next stage.