[clug] My Kubuntu problem

[Keith Sayers]

On Wednesday 22 June 2011 Michael Hirt explained  :

> Primary partitions are numbered 1 to 4. I.e sda1, sda2, sda3 & sda4.
> The extended partition is a container partition to hold logical partitions.
> Logical partitions start at number 5. I.e sda5, sda6 etc

To which Sam Couter added :

> A disk can have up to four primary partitions. sdx1 to sdx4 are reserved
> for these. The partition records are held directly in the partition
> table which has a fixed, small size.

But Scott Ferguson puzzled over :

> My first question would be - why the extended partition? Do you have a
> Microsoft OS installed?

	Not on the same drive.  In retirement I am offering my spreadsheet and database skills 
to such as voluntary and community organisations and so far that has meant Excel and 
Access but I keep those on a separate drive (part of the reason for having several).  

> What is particularly confusing is that you said you installed to a
> drive, and then re-jumpered the drive you installed to - changing it
> (sic) from slave to master - yet the fstab you've posted indicates a
> primary drive! (sda). How is this so??
> If you installed to a slave the fstab should show /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc
> or /dev/sdd.... re-jumpering (which implies changing the position on the
> drive cable) doesn't modify fstab.

	The background to all this is that I am in a process of upgrading both hardware and 
software - which process has been so fraught with frustration at every step that it has 
led me to using both belt and braces all the way through.  At this stage that meant 
removing both 'resident' hard drives, jumpering the 'recipient' drive as slave, inserting 
that and the CD into the machine, changing Setup to boot from the CD, and thereby loading 
the Kubuntu 10.4 onto the hard drive.  I then removed the CD and I think did an immediate 
attempt at booting from the hard drive without success, but certainly I then rejumpered 
the recipient drive as master and tried booting - which produced the aforesaid problem.  
When asked for the fstab I replaced  one of the original drives in the machine and then 
used that to read the fstab on the recipient drive (now jumpered back to slave) - hence 
the sdb result.

	Sorry - it is a bit of a muddle - partly due to my grey matter no longer working as 
well as it used to - but the good news is that I am progressing and my thanks to everyone 
who helped.

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Keith Sayers                                                       keiths at apex.net.au
6 Clambe Place
CHARNWOOD, ACT 2615,
Australia                                            http://www/apex.net.au/~keiths
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