[clug] why not to play with partitions when you don't really understand what you are doing

[Robin Shannon]

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.

-- 
Hit me: <http://robin.shannon.id.au>
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I wanted to be John Cleese and it took some time to realize the job
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