[Leaplist] Partitioning Gurus?

[Chris]

pberry2 at cfl.rr.com wrote:

> 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.
>
Yes, I am very confused. I thought SDA3 was an extended partition,
but you show it as (logical). My understanding was that you were
allowed four primary partitions, because there are only four
partition entries in the MBR - and up to three of those partitions
can be Extended partitions, which can contain multiple logical
partitions.
http://www.minix3.org/doc/partitions.html


> 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!
>
OK, I'll give it a shot, but it looks like Dell has used all four
partition entries in the MBR, so I'm not sure where there's
room for any more extended partitions??? Did you meant that
I would be able to create more logical partitions in the SDA3
extended partition?


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

Not too fiddled with - it's brand new. I tried this Monday last week,
then decided to hold off when I found all the partitions - Wednesday
last week, his HD died. Dell, to their credit had it replaced with
a pre-imaged drive for his laptop within three days. And the pre-imaged
drive is exactly the same.

Dell has apparently gotten "cute" lately:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm
I'm still trying to sort through this page, but it looks
similar to my friend's layout.

Cheers,

Chris