[clue-tech] Partition madness

[Jim Ockers]

Hi Angelo,

> Maybe someone can tell me what's going on here.  On my hard drive I have:
> 
> Linux /boot
> NTFS
> extended:
>     FAT32
>     Linux /
>     Linux swap
>     Linux /home

Unfortunately this isn't helpful to tell what your partitioning
scheme is.  Please try this (here's an example from my system)
as root:

[1413] root at system:/root > fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *         1         9     72261   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            10        43    273105   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda3            44     14946 119708347+  83  Linux

The type of filesystem on the partition is irrelevant to
the actual partition map.  Your reference to "the FAT32 par-
tition" doesn't say anything about that partition other
than that it has a FAT32 filesystem on it.  Unfortunately
that's not how the Linux kernel and filesystem utilities
generally identify partitions.

Once you see the fdisk partition list you will be a lot
closer to understanding which partition you actually
wanted to delete.

> I just tried deleting the FAT32 partition so I could absorb it into the
> Linux world, but it said something about the parition being currently
> used (even though it was unmounted).  So I booted windows 2000 and
> deleted the "logical drive" from there.  Then /boot could no longer load
> my / partition!  Very strange.  So after a while, I re-made the FAT32
> partition in windows,  and now it's working again.

DOS fdisk or Windows disk manager may not tell you the full story
about your partitioning scheme or where the partitions are
relative to each other.  I recommend that in a mixed environment
you should use linux fdisk only for deleting or resizing partitions.

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/
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