On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, Marc Audard wrote: > > . . . > > I have Win ME and LM 8.2 (updated from LM 8.0). But indeed I would like > to overwrite LM8.2 with RH, not that I dislike LM, but I need RH for > some ``supported'' packages (looks like Win!!) > > . . . > > Regarding the answer of Civileme: > > So Mandrake allows that. OK. But is there a way now to ``fix'' this, or > do I have to live along with this? Or should I reinstall Linux Mandrake > setting hda4 as Logical? > > Marc
Like some of the others, I'm puzzled, which might just be my ignorance showing. Here's your partition table from an earlier post (I've tightened up the spacing to improve visibility: >Partition Table for /dev/hda > > First Last > # Type Sector Sector Offset Length Filesystem Type (ID) Flags >-- ------- -------- --------- ------ --------- ---------------------- --------- > 3 Primary 0 433754 63 433755 Linux (83) None (00) > 1 Primary 433755 9622934 0 9189180 Win95 FAT32 (LBA) (0C) Boot (80) > 2 Primary 9622935 39070079 0 29447145 Extended (05) None (00) > 5 Logical 9622935 11181239 63 1558305 Linux swap (82) None (00) > 4 Primary 11181240 11984489 0 803250 Linux (83) None (00) > 6 Logical 11984490 20161574 63 8177085 Linux (83) None (00) > 7 Logical 20161575 39070079 63 18908505 Linux (83) None (00) > > >So the extended hda2 partition (which actually I was never able to see during >the installation of Mandrake 8.0 or 8.2) encompasses the Linux ext2 partitions >hda3-hda7. It doesn't look to me like it encompasses hda3, which *precedes* it, if I'm not mistaken. That's the first thing that seems odd to me, that you seem to have chopped off both the back *and* the front of your original windows partition. It looks to me like you started out with the original windows partition, reduced it, then made the rest of the disk an extended primary partition (which would normally have been) divided into several logical partitions. However, you tried to designate at least two of those logical partitions as primary, which in my inexperienced eyes breaks the logic of the system. I'm wondering if the primary between 0 and 433754 is DiskDrake's way of avoiding the contradition of making a *part* of an extended primary a primary partition itself, by taking a chunk out of the windows partition and thus staying out of the 9622935 to 39070079 extended partition which I wouldn't think could *contain* a primary. But then you designated *another* of the contained partitions as primary, and apparently this time DiskDrake said, "OOOkay, if that's what you want." But I'm not surprised RedHat wouldn't swallow it. >Why is Mandrake able to work on such a partition table? Good question. Like Civeleme said, it must be pretty damned robust. >What I did: > >a) reduce the Win partition >b) create manually (using the diskdrake tool at the installation step) > partitions c) and that was all! "All" you did, it appears to me, was ask it to make primary partitions out of partitions which were themselves part of an extended primary partition, which in my admittedly limited understanding is a bad thing to do. > . . . > > Regarding the answer of Civileme: > > So Mandrake allows that. OK. But is there a way now to ``fix'' this, or > do I have to live along with this? Or should I reinstall Linux Mandrake > setting hda4 as Logical? > > Marc It would make sense to try that, at least according to my quite possibly mistaken understanding of the logic of partitioning. However, RedHat has several times barfed on my Mandrake partitions, and I'm pretty sure I had had an hda1 primary at /, hda2 primary swap, hda3 primary at /home, and a primary extended into logical partitions hda5 at /usr and hda6 at /var (if I remember correctly). I wouldn't have thought that would be a problem, but it said each time that it couldn't read the partition table. I've been attributing it to the fact that the Mandrake partitions were ReiserFS, but I don't know. So you might still have to wipe. Of course, my "analysis" is probably full of holes, since I don't know much about partitioning except by trying to logic it out. Dale Huckeby
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
