Help me to format partition

Dear all!

I'm reading to install Oracle 10g using ASM in single Database on RHEL 5.
The only one hard-disk was 320gb on this machine, so, I just want to device the un-formatted disk into 4 raws device.

I've worked in Solaris, BE Unix, but never work on Linux.

May you help me?

Thank you!

Sorry, I misunderstood the question, so I had to remove my reply not to confuse anybody in the future.

Thank you!

I've got it, done. Since ASM does not use any extension from OS, so the raw devices are raw, not ext, ufs or zfs. I made by editing /etc/sysconf/rawdevices as:

/dev/raw/raw1 /dev/hda7
...
/dev/raw/raw1 /dev/hda11

Thank you!

One more question: Why are default block size in Linux = 4096? I've installed RHEL 5 - 64bit?

---------- Post updated at 02:44 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:15 PM ----------

No, you're right.

This is the test ASM on single disk, of course, Oracle recommend to use separated physical volumes (such as SCSI - sda/sdb ... RAID - c0tx ).

Because I've got only one hard disk - IDE controller, so that, I used to device it into many partitions, some parts was mount and format by mkfs.ext(x) -block ..., the other was not formatted, and pinned in /etc/rawdevices as raw.