Help with fdisk please (Tony)

[Rodney Peters]

On Thursday 28 March 2002 20:47, Tony wrote:

>Thanks for all the replies folks.

> >Yes.  It does appear you have the space.  Use cfdisk if possible, it will 
show
>> you the blank space you have.

>I shall have a look for cfdisk.

My practice is to use only one partitioning tool for each HDD - currently 
that is cfdisk.  Have a look for version 2.11b or later.

As well as backing up your data (plus system ?), consider using dd to copy 
your partition table to floppy.  That may enable you to recover from 
screw-ups early in the procedure.

I agree with other correspondents that using cfdisk to create partitions in 
the 2 free chunks is the safest approach.  Creating a partition(s) after cyl 
633 ought to be trouble free.  Creating any between cyl 255-352 will 
re-number existing partitions, causing wrong configurations in LILO and 
/etc/fstab.  It's not unduly difficult to get them back in order if you are 
able to boot linux from a floppy (or CD) and have printed out the LILO 
mini-HOWTO beforehand.

Re-sizing would not gain much.  Apart from /boot, the linux partitions may 
well need the space currently allocated, in the the long-term.   The 
probability is that you would end up re-partitioning from scratch unless you 
can avoid the following catch 22:

	Partion Magic 4.01 appears to work OK on partitions have been created 
in windows compatibility mode (the default for cfdisk, Partion Magic, OS/2 
fdisk, windows fdisk).  When re-sizing linux partitions that were created 
using linux fdisk, it leaves the first cyl of each logical partition unused.  
This will be 8 MB chunks on your translated drive.  Not what you are seeking.

	GNU parted appears to do the opposite and separates these chunks out when 
re-sizing a linux partition that was created using a windows-compatible fdisk 
 Compounding the problem, it automatically turns these chunks into mini ext2 
partitions, thereby re-numbering partitions and getting LILO and /etc/fstab 
out of sorts.  You are then faced with a second iteration to use up the 8 M 
chunks and (hopefully) restore the partition numbering to the boot 
configuration.

>>
> >However, unless this is a laptop, you should have a think about slapping in
> >another drive.  2Gb drives are way cheap, and you are living in the land of
> >cool electronics.

>Its a laptop, an old p133.  Not really worth spending the $$ on a new 
>harddrive.  This 6gig one
>is actually one I got cheap to upgrade the 1.4gig which was in it. 

If you have only 32 MB RAM, then cfdisk should run fine, but you would 
probably need to resize one partition at a time if using Partition Magic.  
Otherwise it can choke in the middle of a re-size - bye data.