[clue-tech] Re: clue-tech Digest, Vol 8, Issue 10

[Stephen Herr]

> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. A tip from Saturday's Installfest (Collins Richey)
>    2. Re: A tip from Saturday's Installfest (Nate Duehr)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2006 09:30:24 -0700
> From: "Collins Richey" <crichey at gmail.com>
> Subject: [clue-tech] A tip from Saturday's Installfest
> To: "CLUE tech" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<e00942e40611120830r7b26fb73o7cff71511edd2995 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> 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.
>
>   

This brings up a question I have had for some time.  I have a 320GB 
external Western Digital USB/FireWire drive.  Great little device.  I 
re-partitioned it into the max 4 partitions, one of which is the swap 
space.  One of the partitions is a version of Ubuntu and I want to add 
another flavor or two by way of extended partitions.  The question is 
this:  Can all of them use the same 4GB swap partition?  Or do I need to 
create multiple extended partition swap partitions?

Stephen