Re: [LUG] Linux partitions

[<kam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 06:15:43PM +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
> 
> When I did install Partition Magic on the old Windows partition, it only 
> showed two partitions: Windows and Linux (which being an extended partition 
> included the swap partition). So the current 2 Linux partitions should be 
> adjacent.
> 
> I've got this from fdisk -l under the current Linux only system:
> /dev/hda1    *     1           197       83         Linux
> /dev/hda2         198        525       85          Linux extended
> /dev/hda5         198       497      83           Linux
> /dev/hda6          498       525      82          Linux swap
> 
> So the Linux partition on hda1 (the old Windows partition) is adjacent to the 
> Linux extended partition (hda2) and the original Linux partition within the 
> extended area starts without a gap, so is also adjacent?
> 
hda5 & 6 are virtual partitions, bloody great files I suppose, that live
inside hda2 which is a "real" partition. There can only be four of these,
the partition table needs to be read by the BIOS before it knows about
anything much beyond tracks and sectors so it has a fixed size with
only four slots. There's no reason why the two Linux partitions (ext2 
and swap) couldn't have been hda2 and hda3, but I know that the Mandrake
installer pulls this trick (using virtual partitions) if you leave it to
its own devices. Best to set up the partitions you want first with cfdisk,
then the installer registers them and asks what you want to put in them,
I think hda1 needs to be the root (/) partition if you want to boot the
system with lilo, at least if hda1 is bigger than a gig or so.

I'd say that Partition Magic is seeing the two "real" partitions and 
missing the virtual hda5 & 6 altogether, so I'd be very wary of trying
to merge a real and a virtual partition unless the PM manual specifically
says it can do this.

> (Someone please tell me I'm reading this right before I trash this system 
> AGAIN!)
> 
> :-))

Well, discretion can be the better part of valour. Do you really need
to do this? What have you got in each of your existing partitions, how
big are they, how much free space? You might be better off just moving
parts of the file system around to get a better balance of free space.

Keith



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