[wplug] Disk Partition Help

Sun Jul 14 12:16:18 EDT 2002

On Sunday, July 14, 2002, at 10:14  AM, Sean McCune wrote:

> Well, first off... are your C: D: and E: drive truly separate hard
> drives, or are they just different partitions on one physical drive?
>
> /dev/hda is the first physical hard drive in your system... the master
> of the IDE0 controller.
>
> /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, etc... are all partitions on that first
> physical hard drdive.
>
> /dev/hdb is the second physical hard drive. And /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdb2,
> etc are partitions on that drive.
>
> /dev/hdc is the third physical hard drive... and so on...

This isn't entirely accurate.  /dev/hda is the Primary Master IDE disk.  
/dev/hdb is the Primary Slave.  /dev/hdc is the Secondary Master.  
/dev/hdd is the Secondary Slave.  You can get more disks on some 
systems, where you'll have /dev/hde and /dev/hdf (master and slave) and 
beyond.  The naming isn't based on the number of disks, for example you 
could have your disk on the Primary master, and your CD ROM on your 
additional IDE bus' Primary Master, and they'd be /dev/hda and /dev/hde 
respectively.

> But given that you're talking about things like /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda6,
> I'm guessing that C: D: and E: are all partitions on one physical drive.
>
> It sounds like you have too many partitions to make another bootable
> partition on that drive.  But the thing to try would be to eliminate the
> drive E: partition using Win2K.  Then that partition will be gone, and
> you should see free space under Druid.  You still might have too many
> partitions to be able to create a bootable one.

Linux doesn't really need another bootable partition, since LILO and 
GRUB can boot linux off of any partition.  Anyway, it looks like there 
are really only two primary partitions on his disk, one for NTFS, and 
one extended holding the other two.  Deleting a partition would free up 
space, but I gather from the description that it really isn't an option, 
there's data on that partition.  Either delete/move the data and remove 
the partition, or resize the partition.

> Your best bet might be to buy a second hard drive, and install it as the
> master on IDE0, and move your original drive to the master on IDE1.
> Then install linux on hda, which will be your new, empty hard drive.
> When the installation process installs GRUB, it will see your bootable
> windows partitions on the other drive and include them in the boot up
> menu.  You'd be able to partition and mount the 15 Gb free space on your
> original hard drive as /usr or /var or something if you wanted...

I agree that buying a new disk might solve several problems.  But don't 
try moving disks around, it seems kind of pointless, just install linux 
on the new disk.  Windows doesn't like booting off of anything but the 
Primary Master on the first IDE bus.  Linux doesn't have any problems 
booting off other disks or at the end of the disk.

> Clear as mud, huh?

Indeed.

> McC
>
>
> On Sun, 2002-07-14 at 09:30, R. Lance Martin wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am installing Red Hat Linux on a Dell Dimension running Windows 2000 
>> pro. My C: and D: drives are essentially full, but my E: drive has 
>> about 15 GB of disk space. I intend to install Linux on this drive.
>>
>> I am using the Red Hat disks that come with the O-Reilly "Learning Red 
>> Hat Linux" book. I am choosing a maual
>> parition strategy (with disk druid), but when I attempt to create my 
>> partitons in the paritions window, I run into problems:
>> 	In the disk setup, /dev/hda2 seems to be broken up into /hda5 and 
>> /hda6 (16000 and 37000 MB respectivly). Unlike the example given in 
>> the guide, however, both of these drives are listed as Type NTFS/HPTS 
>> rather than "Free Space". When I try to create a new  partition, I 
>> enter the proper values (Mount Point, Filesystem Type, etc.) but I get 
>> an error "could not allocate the partitons as primary partitons"
>>
>> Questions:
>> 1.Do I need to use a utility, such as fdisk, to partiton the E: drive 
>> prior to the Partiton window in the installation? (i.e. Do I need to 
>> create a chunk of free space on the drive before creating the mount 
>> points in the intallation?) How can I do this easily with Win 2000 - 
>> fdisk is not an option in the 2000 OS and I do not want to purchase 
>> Partiton Majic?
>> 2. If the type is not "Free Space," is one unable to create the 
>> partition (specify the mount points)?
>> 3. How can one tell which Windows filesystem (C:, D:, E:) is 
>> associated with each /hda (drive) in the installation window? In other 
>> words, I want to ensure that I am installing Linux on my E: drive, but 
>> in the installation I cannot determire which /hda refers to E:.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Lance
>>
>>
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>
>
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   Jonathan Billings
billings+ at cs.cmu.edu