Finding a new partition

[Bradmont]

I just chopped another 5 gigs of my windows partition with Fips, and I want to mount it as /home, but I don't know how to find the device name...
Windows is on /dev/hda1, linux on /dev/hda2, and my swap partitions are /dev/hda4&5...
My guess would be that the new partition would be on hda6, but I'm not sure... the lack of a hda3 seems kinda strange.

But anyway, can anyone tell me how to find out (or should I just play around with it until I find it...).

BTW, there is no filesystem on the partition.

Thanks

[Craig McPherson]

Run fdisk /dev/hda in Linux. You'll see your new partition there.

Anyway, here's how you set it up before you ran FIPS:

/dev/hda1: Windows
/dev/hda2: Linux
/dev/hda3: Extended (containing /dev/hda5)
/dev/hda4: Swap

Now here's the thing... a disk can only have four primary partitions. Those were your four primary partitions above. If you had make your other swap partition (the one that was currently hda4) a logical partition rather than a primary partition (by extending your Extended partition, /dev/hda3, to the end of the disk), it would have been /dev/hda6, and you'd only have had 3 primary partitions. Then, you could have split /dev/hda1, and the split-off section would have become /dev/hda4, even though it would have been out of physical order on the disk -- Linux can handle that, even though fdisk will complain.

Now that you've split one of your primary partitions into two... you've probably just stuffed your partition table. I'm right that FIPS still splits partitions into two rather than just cutting space off one of them, right? If it just cut space off, you'd be left with unpartitioned disk space you couldn't do anything with because you already have 4 primary partitions. Now that it's split it... man, I don't know what your partition table is going to look like.

But open it up in Linux fdisk, and use the "v" command to check your partition table. Hopefully it won't be in too bad of a state.

Just remember: hda1 through hda4 are ALWAYS primary partitions. A drive can never have more than four. An Extended partition is a type of Primary partition. A disk can only have one Extended partition. hda5 or anything beyond that is a logical partition INSIDE the disks's extended partition.

[This message has been edited by Craig McPherson (edited 23 January 2001).]

[Bradmont]

Hey, thanks Craig. I'll do that. I guess it doesn't really matter if the partition table is completely screwed, tho, because I'm going to ditch RedHat in a few days and switch to Debian... I'll probibally repartition everything at that time (instead of having just my root partition and nothing else ;D).

[teeitup]

Search through the dmesg file for hda.

dmesg | grep hda

It should list all the partitions on the disk.

Good Luck,



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