Hi Paul, Paul Saenz wrote: > Or do the cli partitioners like parted and fdisk allow you to > make 3 primary partitions and then the 4th extended?
Any partitioner worth using will allow you to make 3 primary partitions and an extended volume in the 4th. > I know it is dangerous or risky, or whatever you want to call it, > but do you think I can change an extended partition to a primary > after the OS is already installed? I think you can. Let's assume you have 1 primary partition (/dev/sda1), an extended partition space (/dev/sda2), and one extended partition (/dev/sda5) Let's assume that your total number of cylinders is 38913 (because my hard drive is that), and the 1st primary partition ends on cylinder 37435. What you'll see is this. /dev/sda1 * 1 37435 300696606 83 Linux /dev/sda2 37436 38913 11872035 5 Extended /dev/sda5 37436 38913 11872003+ 82 Linux swap On my drive, I have a single primary volume, and an extended swap partition. Look at the starting & ending cylinders of both the extended (/dev/sda2) and the swap partition (/dev/sda5) - they are the same boundaries. So - theoretically speaking - there is a filesystem that exists from cylinder 37436 to cylinder 38913. If you were to delete the partition entry for /dev/sda5 and the extended partition /dev/sda2 - you could create a primary partition on /dev/sda2 with the exact same boundaries - and you should see the filesystem. PLEASE BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE TRYING THIS. (I would turn off swap and try this with my /dev/sda5 tonight but I'm not in a position to do that now.) Also - This may be possible with a tool like gparted. I bet Roger would know for sure exactly how to do it. > You may ask why I want to make the partition primary Actually I won't. > Also what is the best tool for formatting to reiserfs? The reason > I ask that question is because, although I am not certain, but > it seems to me that some fs writers do a more thorough job than > others. What that means, I don't exactly know. All I know is that > some seem to do it in seconds, while others seem to take a much > longer time. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that it would be > more likely to lose data with the quick ones. Your assumptions about performance or reliability based on the time it takes to create an empty filesystem are nutty. Do you know if ReiserFS is even being maintained anymore? Is anyone doing active development to enhance it? Are you needing a feature that Reiser obviously does better (it is somewhat faster at reading a volume when you have millions of very small files, like a news server or mail server might have.) Do you know what it takes to recover a corrupted ReiserFS volume? I would recommend against using ReiserFS unless you really understand it and have a good reason to use it. > And it is experimental. It helps me learn. In that case, if you are wanting to learn - then switch everything to ReiserFS - you'll be constantly learning. :) > Ultimately, I am putting backtrack on my laptop so I can start sniffing. I'm assuming by "sniffing" you're not talking about quickly breathing in the air around you and sampling it with your olfactories. I would strongly advise you to learn and understand everything that is in backtrack on your own systems/network. There are tools in backtrack that do things that if you were to use on a public network, or against a public system - you could be a person of interest to a network admin, system operator, or law enforcement. It's good to learn the ins and outs of TCP - so definitely practice with backtrack at home. _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list [email protected] http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
