On Saturday 08 September 2007 01:15, Felix Miata wrote: > On 2007/09/08 00:49 (GMT-0400) Bob S apparently typed: > > A while back I purchased a 250 GB Sata drive, intending to install > > different os's and or versions of SuSE. I installed 10.2 on my shiny new > > drive but I stupidly partitioned 3 primaries, /, /swap, and /home, and > > used the fourth primary for the extended partition. Dumb move - Out of > > partitions with about 150GB of free space. (I run 10.0 on another small > > IDE drive) > > Not exactly dumb. Without "sacrificing" a primary for use as an extended, > you're limited to 4 partitions total. There are only two ways to be out of > available unpartitioned space to add a logical if an extended already > exists: > Felix, Rajko, Mike, Thanks for responding. You each have contributed something to me.
For Felix > 1-100% of freespace is already allocated to partitions > 2-all existing freespace is located in between two primary partitions > neither of which is an extended partition > Neither of those are the problem. The fourth primary (sda4) is the extended and all of the free space is after that. However, Yast partitioner will not allow me to create or edit it because of the extended partition size restrictions. It will not let me resize it neither because supposedly it is the wrong file system type. So, now all of the free space is lost behind it. Does this mean I have to delete the extended partition and make it extend to the end of the disk and lose all of my present logical partitions? > > Is the /home as safe residing in the extended partition? > > The difference between logical and primary partitions only matters to boot > loaders and legacy DOS and windoz operating systems. Linux once booted sees > partitions as partitions without distinction between logical & primary, > which means there's no difference in "safety", whatever that means. OK, understood. I always just liked my /home separate and secure from all other vagaries of the system. > > > I could never delete > > or change the extended partition because they would wipe out /home - > > right? > > The "extended partition" is nothing but a series of marker sectors pointing > to partitions that don't have table entries in the MBR, plus a primary > partition table entry that starts the marker chain by pointing to the first > logical partition. > OK > > Is it a good idea to have /swap on the extended partition? > > Linux doesn't care. Generally the best place for swap is wherever your > disk's fastest access exists, usually but not always at or near the > "front". > OK again > > Do you use the > > same /swap for all of the os's? (e.g. like my /swap for 10.0 on the IDE > > drive?) > > Linux installers generally will use every swap partition they can find. If > you have multiple swap partitions, you'll have to manually change each new > fstab to use whichever swap partitions you want used for that Linux. Do you mean that if there are two separate swap partitions they can be combined? > > > How do you manage to run 3 or 4 os variants on just 4 primary partitions? > > I doubt anyone does. There's no reason to. I usually have a maintenance > and/or boot partition on the first, a boot manager on the second, a small > primary type 0x06 for DOS and/or windoz, and everything else as logicals, > typically more than 20 total per disk. > OK, but that means you have used up two very small primary partitions and one larger one for DOS/Windows, right? That leaves the fourth as an extended for everything else. > On partitioning generally: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/partitioningindex.html Spent over an hour reading it. Very informative. but a few questions: The LVM you talk about there; that is a OS2 thing right? Different from LVM in Linux. I originally used LVM in 10.0 and when I installed 10.2 it seemed to want to add the 10.2 LVM to the original 10.0 system. I just gave up with fooling with it in 10.2 and installed the partitions as straight partitions. Maybe I just don't understand how it works. > -- Next question; you seem to indicate that it is necessary to have a boot manager on the first partition of the first drive to boot more than two os's. I don't really recall but I think there was some kind of boot manager as seen by a really old Partition Magic for Win 98 while using LILO. (Win98 still there on hda taking up space to just play a silly game once-in-awhile) If it is not, will I need to install one to run 10.3 once it is installed? Thanks for your patience. Bob S. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
