[clue-tech] A tip from Saturday's Installfest

[Collins Richey]

As usual Dave Anselmi put together a fine installfest, and everyone I
talked to went away quite pleased with the results for their systems.
All of you others who were MIA missed a fine event.

Here's a little bit of info to tuck away in your bag of tricks. At
least two participants encountered this scenario, and I wasn't smart
enough to catch it at first. It pays to know the limits for partitions
on a hard drive before starting a dual/multi-boot setup.

Manfred came with a system that had two harddrives, Windows, and two
existing Linux distros and wanting to put the latest Kubuntu 6.10 on
the system. As an aside, he had one of the nicest mini-cases I've
seen, and this is a true no-name system (no labels of any sort other
than 'made in China'). Both harddrives had all space allocated to
existing filesystems, so we had to look for something to chop back.The
Ubuntu installer provides no way to shrink an existing ext3 partition
(that I'm aware of), but it does allow you to shrink an NTFS (Windows
partition). So we chopped back the NTFS partition leaving something
like 70G free space. We were working from the Kubuntu desktop CD
(LiveCD) and the gui installer. After freeing up the space, we could
find no way to turn the free space into a new ext3 partition, so we
restarted the installation from the Kubuntu alternate CD (not a
livecd, text-mode installer). The results were the same, but the
partitioner provided more useful descriptions. The free space we had
created was labeled "unusable space".

About this time the light bulb went on. The layout of the disk we were
working with was as follows:

sda1 - NTFS (Windows)
free space
sda2 - swap space
sda3 - Linux ext3 (home)
sda4 - Linux ext3 (root for a SuSE installation)

This means that all primary partitions permitted for a harddrive were
in use, thus rendering the new free space we had created (between sda1
and sda2) "unusable space". The solution was simple. We deleted the
swap space, and then the partitioner was able to create a new extended
partition where we could allocate new swap space and a root partition.

Keep this one in mind -  a max of 4 primary partitions for a harddrive
one of which can be extended.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.