On Friday 16 December 2005 7:43 pm, Lovell Mcilwain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >Whoa! That partition table is really convolved there. Your extended > >partition is first on the disk, then your Linux swap and Linux root. > >Then your hda5 is a logical parition in your extended partition. I > >have never seen partitions laid out like this before.
While the partition table *is* a little strange, it will work as-is. Think of a partition table as having four "slots" where partition information can be stored. In the old days, we didn't have such large drives and DOS was limited to 32MB anyway, so only having four slots was reasonable. The partition table is stored in the "Master Boot Record" -- the first 512-byte sector of the disk. When disk drives became larger, the "extended partition" was born. Any of the four slots can be used for an extended partition; the extended partition is stored outside the MBR (usually in another set of disk sectors near the beginning of the disk), but contains the same information. Linux numbers the primary partitions as 1-4 depending on which slot in the partition table is used, or as 5-63 if they appear in the extended partition. Windoze doesn't do this: it assigns drive letters sequentially. (Well, not really. For our discussion, saying that Windoze assigns them sequentially is good enough. Really though, drive letters are assigned to all recognized primary partitions on each drive (in order), then drive letters are assigned to all recognized extended partitions (in the same disk order). That way, a new disk can be added and the entire thing can be an extended partition, allowing the user to avoid having to change the drive letters on other drives already installed...) Partitioning information can appear in any of the 4 slots and in any order. So his partition table is actually just fine. Strange, but fine. > >I know rebuilding would be a pain, but you might seriously consider > >it. And if you do, I suggest that you partition your hard disk a > >little more...normally? Put Windows first on the disk in a *primary* > >partition, then put your Linux partitions. I recommend at least a > >swap, /, and /home. With the /home, you can blow away your system and > >keep your data files (as long as you keep them in your home). > > > >Jonathan > > This makes total sense. I will try those options and if that doesn't > work I will rebuild and clean up my partitions better. This is actually a very good technique: /, swap, and /home. There is not much need anymore for a /boot partition. My recommendation, if you don't mind the hassle of installing again, would be to install Windoze into the first partition, then install Linux. Let the Linux installer create three partitions (/, swap, and /home). I like to play around with new releases, so I keep another 6GB partition where I can install the latest and greatest. (So I run SUSE 9.2 mainly, but I have SUSE 10.0 or FC4 or Kubuntu or whatever on that last partition. This gets tricky with GRUB, though, so I wouldn't recommend it until you've had a chance to try it out on a "sandbox" machine that you don't mind reinstalling a few times. :-) The technique for recovering a screwed up GRUB installation is actually very easy. It takes about 3 minutes to do. :-) But I tried to be complete in case someone was going to grab the info and put it on the wiki (I'd do it myself, but time is slim enough as it is; I'll write the article here and let someone else with more wiki experience move it!). Good luck, and let us know what happens. We care. :-) -- Frank J. Edwards Edwards & Edwards Consulting, LLC Voice: (813) 996-7954 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Large Attachments To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
