Foolishness at its best!

H

Good morning, and welcome to My Foolishness at its best!

Something is wrong in this image. I did a foolish thing when I installed Fedora 9 when it came out on this 3rd disk and now as a result I cannot install Arch-64 which I had intended to do in the highlighted partition. Can anybody guess?

*www.imgx.org/pfiles/10076/fool.png

/me kicks myself! Yes please, all kick me once, I deserve it, for the lack of common sense in my bird-sized brain!

/me Kicks Hitboxx

You made your last partition sdc4 as primary instead of extended, isnt it ?

ya exactly.. you should've included the /dev/sdc4 in the extended logical partition which would then result in /dev/sdc8.. now there are two ways.. either install Arch on that 168 GiB partition and share a common swap (/dev/sdc6) or you can delete your extended and teh /dev/sdc4 partition and then make a new extended partition which covers all the space.

oh and BTW.. here's a kick

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Now playing: Nirvana - Come As You Are-Live
via FoxyTunes

M

Delete sdc4 and make it into extended?

mehulved said:
Delete sdc4 and make it into extended?

Yea..That should not be a problem since the partition is free (only 69 MB used).Also I guess sdc4 is the boot partition?

but I don't think that merging sdc4 with the extended partition would be possible.. i tried that once on Ubuntu.. and it failed.. don't know weather partition magic can do it.. please try and post results.. I think that you've to delete the whole extended partition and then delete the sdc4 partition.. then you'll get a whole new free space which can be then made into one big extended partition..

H

Right on the money hellknight ^_^. I cannot merge/move the big partition into the extended partition nor can I create another extended partition when one already exists on the hard disk. As a rule, a single hard disk can hold either 4 primary partitions or 3 primary and 1 extended partitions IIRC. Never tried other things like PartitionMagic and I don't know if that is possible.

Only possible things I can see is converting sdc1 ans sdc2 into ext3 with mount / and /home OR deleting the entire extended partition to accumulate the whole of the remaining disk space including sdc4 and repartition.

If anybody got some other ideas, please share.. and thanks for the kick

Hitboxx said:
Only possible things I can see is converting sdc1 ans sdc2 into ext3 with mount / and /home OR deleting the entire extended partition to accumulate the whole of the remaining disk space including sdc4 and repartition.

If you convert sdc1 and sdc2, you will have transfer loads of data from 1 and 2 to 7.Thats not the optimal way I guess.

how about transferring data from sdc4,sdc5 and sdc7 to sdc1 or sdc2, formatting all partitons except sdc1 and sdc2 and carrying on from there. Considering you just have to move about 8 GB of data in all, it seems like a good idea.

H

Yep, but there is a catch, I have heavily customised Fedora by now and it will be a real pita to do it all over again, not lazy, but just can't dig enough time not to mention the Arch install that goes with it

Hey.. i've got an idea but don't know whether it'll work or not.. presuming that your Fun partition has about 25GiB space free.. so i think that you should make an image of your Fedora partition with the dd command (i'm not really good at that, but I know that it is possible with few linux commands).. then you can move the image of your Fedora drive to your Fun drive.. after that.. delete the partitions and create a new extended partitions of your choice.. but remember to allocate the same size to the Fedora partition.. then boot from a Ubuntu Live CD.. create a new filesystem formatted with ext3 in /dev/sdc5 and then again 'dd' the image which you threw on the FUN drive (don't forget to mount it)... as for the bootloader.. if you're also using Vista then you can try EasyBCD.. I tried the 'dd' once when, you know, the other OS (guess it) was running wild during initial days, after downloading its mammoth 7.5 GB image from the net .. and that worked.. so try that.. before mods delete this post

And if you don't wanna try that dd command I think that there should be some kind of APTon software for Fedora as there is one on Ubuntu (I'm on OpenSUSE 11, so I don't know that whether it is available for RPM based distros, but you can convert it through the Alien Command).

Then make a backup of your settings and other installed softwares.. and re-install them after the fresh installation of Fedora.. Do let me know whether it worked or not..

hellknight said:
after downloading its mammoth 7.5 GB image from the net .. and that worked.. so try that.. before mods delete this post

Are you asking him to read and then delete your post ?

ha ha.. its called goobiphobia..

Hitboxx said:
Right on the money hellknight ^_^. I cannot merge/move the big partition into the extended partition nor can I create another extended partition when one already exists on the hard disk. As a rule, a single hard disk can hold either 4 primary partitions or 3 primary and 1 extended partitions IIRC. Never tried other things like PartitionMagic and I don't know if that is possible.

Only possible things I can see is converting sdc1 ans sdc2 into ext3 with mount / and /home OR deleting the entire extended partition to accumulate the whole of the remaining disk space including sdc4 and repartition.

If anybody got some other ideas, please share.. and thanks for the kick

Why not delete sdc4 and "add" the newly acquired space as new partitions to the already extended one? You can share swap n home also!

It can't be done.. coz there's a barrier between an extended partition and a primary partition.. so its worthless.. also if he allocates about 10 GB to Arch then the free space left will be waster...

Its really easy to delete /dev/sdc4 and merge free space in Extended Partition. I did that several times using PartedMagic LiveCD.
Just delete /dev/sdc4, select Extended Partition and move outer slider towards right side.

^That is correct. The last partition can be merged with the extended one and then create a new partition.

H

ghost at rest said:
Its really easy to delete /dev/sdc4 and merge free space in Extended Partition. I did that several times using PartedMagic LiveCD.
Just delete /dev/sdc4, select Extended Partition and move outer slider towards right side.

Okies, thanks for the link, will try it and let all know,.

Hitboxx said:
Okies, thanks for the link, will try it and let all know,.

Surprised you don't already have a copy of the 50mb PartedMagic ISO. Its a must for frequent partitioning. Its something like GParted plus a lot of extra stuff.

M

For that foolishness, you deserve to completely format all your 3 HDD's, without taking a backup and install something non-windows, non-linux.

H

MetalheadGautham said:
Surprised you don't already have a copy of the 50mb PartedMagic ISO. Its a must for frequent partitioning. Its something like GParted plus a lot of extra stuff.

/me is not a frequent partitioner

mehulved said:
For that foolishness, you deserve to completely format all your 3 HDD's, without taking a backup and install something non-windows, non-linux.

Thank You, aap ki FreeBSD, aap hi ko mubaarak ho!

F

/me kicks Hitboxx.

Best idea just reformat everything and reinstall everything

Hitboxx said:
/me is not a frequent partitioner

/me remembers the zillion insults hitboxx made against his old HDD(s?) on IRC

H

Hahaha yeah, them

Ok I did it, thanks all, did it using GParted itself, fired up Mint from the 2nd HDD, started GParted, deleted the large partition and resized the extended partition to accumulate all of the remaining space. Then it was just a matter of creating logical partitions.

*www.imgx.org/pfiles/10164/didit.png

M

Now install Aros on it

H

What is Aros?

that means.. the merger of /dev/sdc4 wasn't possible with the previous extended partition??.. isn't it.. tell me what you did in detail.. this is interesting

^^^

I think distros may have issues messing with primary partitions when they are installed.

Thats why its advisable to always use live disc for partitioning - you can mount/unmount any partition of your choice.

Hitboxx, we all know you did an idiotic thing. So let past be past, and perhaps convert the first post into an insruction set on how to solve a problem concerning wrong partitioning. This can later be added to the linux tips and tricks or similar thread as a post to avoid future idiots from suffering.

H

Not required, no big deal!

@hellknight, I did nothing more than what I posted above. That is all the details.