[CLUE-Tech] Partitioning/Formatting newbie question.

[David Anselmi]

Chris Greene wrote:

> I usually try to figure things out by myself by
> experimenting and searching the web, but I have not
> found much on this so I figure I will ask the masters.
>  I installed RH 7.3 last night, deleted ALL partitions
> and left 5 gigs of free space available.

RH 7?  Can't you find anyone to give you newer CDs than that?  Well, 
maybe there are other issues.

> Name         Flags  Part Type  FS Type              
> Size (MB)
> /dev/hda1    Boot    Primary    Linux                
> 258.86
> /dev/hda2            Primary    Linux               
> 8001.13
> /dev/hda3            Primary    Linux               
> 4000.57
> /dev/hda4            Primary    Win95 Extended (LBA)
> 6832.34

You're problem is that there are only 4 primary partitions available on 
Wintel hardware.  By using them all you can't have any more.  If you 
change one of them from primary to extended then you'll be able to put 
logical partitions inside the extended one.

Here's the way it should look:

|[ primary ]|[ primary ]|[ primary ]|[       extended        ]
|           |           |           |[ logical ]|[  logical  ]
|    hda1   |    hda2   |    hda3   |    hda5   |     hda6   |

I didn't show hda4, the extended partition, and cfdisk won't show it to 
you either, though fdisk will.  cfdisk is picky about giving you a sane 
partition table -- which is usually just what you want.

[...]

> I also ran 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' and received the
> following:
> 
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id 
> System
> /dev/hda1   *         1        33    265041   83 
> Linux
> /dev/hda2            34      1053   8193150   83 
> Linux
> /dev/hda3          1054      1563   4096575   83 
> Linux
> /dev/hda4          1564      2434   6996307+   f 
> Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hda5          1564      1628    522081   83 
> Linux
> /dev/hda6          1629      1693    522081   83 
> Linux
> /dev/hda7          1694      1742    393561   83 
> Linux
> /dev/hda8          1743      1754     96358+  82 
> Linux swap

Looks like you had it right at one point.  The Id column is the type of 
partition (83 for Linux, 82 for swap, f for Win 95).  It says Win 95 
because that's the type that's marked in the partition table.  It 
doesn't have anything to do with what's actually in the partition.

Try using fdisk to delete hda4.  Then recreate it as an extended 
partition and use the same start and end.  You probably want to record 
the output of fdisk -lu /dev/hda.  That will show you start and end in 
sectors.  Then when you run fdisk /dev/hda, type u to change units to 
sectors.

After you (w)rite the partition table and (q)uit, reboot and you should 
have access to hda5-8.  Then you can create a new hda9 with the free 
space (use cfdisk; you could have done this when you were running fdisk, 
but why tempt fate).

You have to reboot because the kernel won't get the new partition table 
while it's in use (because you're running off hda).

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

Dave