[clug] Re: linux Digest, Vol 45, Issue 40

[Rodney Peters]

I'm assuming that the problem has been solved since Sunday, but for the 
record:

qtparted does handle extended partitions.  I don't recall the details because 
it's not a partitoner I use often.  May be one of those partitioners that 
create & extend the Extended partiton in the background as you create Logical 
partitons

some Linux partitioners screw up and attempt to use one cylinder {wots a 
cylinder :;-)}  beyond the actual number.  Your error message indicates that 
might be happening.  Solution is to use a lower level partioner such as 
fdisk, to delete & recreate the last partition.  Alternatively, don't attempt 
to use the last cylinder initially.

Changing the partition layout for an installed Linux generally requires 
editing the /etc/fstab as well as the grub menu. 


Rod


 On Sunday 24 September 2006 22:00, linux-request at lists.samba.org wrote:
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>  From: "Robin Shannon" <robin at shannon.id.au>
>  Precedence: list
>  Subject: [clug] why not to play with partitions when you don't really
>         understand what you are doing
>  Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 20:08:50 +1000
>  To: linux at lists.samba.org
>  Message-ID: <623d73380609240308q9d657e7v1d10f344372ac573 at mail.gmail.com>
>  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>  MIME-Version: 1.0
>  Message: 4
>
> G'day,
>
> I set up a friend's computer to dual boot (win XP and kubuntu 6.06
> i386) and everything went all peachy untill...
>
> what we planned to do was have a ntfs windows partition a linux ext3
> partition and a shared FAT32 documents partition (since ntfs under
> linux still isn't quite up to scratch). It is a Dell laptop and dell
> has a tiny FAT16 partition that it has some random files in (i don't
> quite know what they do so i didn't want to touch them) and then linux
> needs a linux-swap so that is 5 partitions all up. When i was setting
> it up i hadn't used qtparted before and couldn't quite work out how to
> create extended partitions so we had the dell partition, the windows
> partition, the linux partition and the linux-swap partition and a
> whole heap of free space (and we thought we would work out how to
> create an extended FAT32 partition later).
>
> So just now i deleated the linux-swap partition (assuming since it was
> just swap it wouldn't matter) and turned that into an extended
> partition with linux-swap as the first logical partition on it and
> then the rest being the FAT32 logical partition.
>
> Windows can now read/write the FAT32 partition just fine (as
> expected), but poor old linux; well it can't boot anymore (as probably
> should have been expected but wasn't). It gets to the "mounting root
> filesystem" part of the boot process then just hangs. In the "recovery
> mode" it gives the following when trying to boot:
>
> <blah blah blah />
> Begin: Running  /scripts/local-premount...
> [17179573.152000] Attempting manual resume
> [17179573.152000] attempt to access beyond end of device
> [17179573.152000] sda4: rw=16, want=8, limit=2
> [17179573.152000] Kernel panic - not syncing: I/O error reading memory
> image [17179573.152000]
>
> note: sda4 is the name of what used to be linux-swap and got turned
> into an extended partition
>
> so... Any ideas? why does it need the stuff in swap? as i understood
> it swap was basically just virtual RAM. How can i tell it where the
> new swap is? do i have any options other than a fresh install?
>
> paz,
> -rjs.