[Leaplist] Partitioning Gurus?

["pberry2" at cfl.rr.com]

Chris wrote:
>
> Urrgh - I talked a friend into installing Linux, for which he
> volunteered his new Dell laptop, as long as he could dual-boot.
> So I fired up GPartEd, all ready to slice and dice, and saw this:
>
> /dev/sda1   fat16   47.03 MiB
> /dev/sda2   ntfs    104.99 GiB
> unallocated            7.84 MiB
> /dev/sda3   extended   2.00 GiB
>   /dev/sda5  fat32   2.00 GiB
> /dev/sda4   fat 32   4.74 GiB       
> Apparently, Dell hase all kinds of really wonderful stuff that
> just has to chew up the available partitions. Thank you, Dell.
> I don't know what these are there for - I suspect the fat16
> is for some Dell Diag utility - and one of the fat32s is
> probably for Ghost? - No clue.
>
> Any suggestions that won't kill his existing functionality?
> While I'm in there, I'd like to sneak in a fat32 partition for
> files he'll use in both systems.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
> _____________

Chris:

You are confused.  sda1/  plus sda2/ plus sda4/ are primary partitions.  
then,  they made extended sda3/ (logical)  2.0Gb and put sda5/ (logical) 
there.

When you resize sda2/ down to like 40Gb,  you will get an extended 
partition sda6/ through sda?? out of it for as many as you like, up to 
the 64Gb that is made, in this example, to be free for use.  The 7.84 Gb 
unallocated space could be made into a FAT32 extended logical partition 
for file transfers!

I thought Dell did better work than all that so I think this has been 
fiddled with since it was built.