creating partitions at the command line

["Hugo Rabson" <hugo www nashville-now com>]

Problem: How to create a floppy which will boot into its own little Linux,
create and format partitions on the hard drive, and untar files (.tar.gz's
held on a CDROM) onto said hard drive.

Solution: TOMSRTBT, 'stb' (save the hard disk's boot sector), 'stf' (save
each partition's MBR), 'afio' and 'sfdisk'... but I can't get the parameters
for sfdisk right. I can create primary partitions, no problem, but I can't
seem to make extended partitions (/dev/hda[5-9]).

In theory, I suppose I could make a carbon copy of the device ('cat /dev/hda
| tar -cz > /dev/hdd/hda.tgz') but what if the destination hard drive has a
different cylinder/sector configuration?

TIA,

Hugo ... in over his head :^)