Help with mandriva 2009

[Guest manilock]

alright so i just bought mandriva 2009 and i installed it on my new computer which had a blank hard drive i went ahead and split the hard drive down the middle by creating two partitions "i thought i was going to install vista also" and now im limited to half my hard drive is their anyway i can combine the two parts of my hard drive together without reinstalling the OS

 

Step by step instuctions would be nice lol many thanks

[theYinYeti]

Welcome on this board.

 

I'm sure what you want to do can be done, although it will be more or less difficult depending on the exact layout of the drive.

Could you report to us the output of those commands, ran as root:

cfdisk -P s
df -k

 

Yves.

[Guest manilock]

alright first off i dont know how to do what you wanted me to lol sorry i am a big noobie to this if you could just tell me how i would be more then happy to give you the information

[neddie]

How about you describe how you set the drive up, did you just create two partitions and put the Mandriva bits all in a single partition, or did you create separate partitions for /, swap and /home ? If you just used two partitions, is Windows in the first one or is Mandriva?

 

If you go into the Mandriva control centre (Menu - Tools - System Tools - Configure your computer) and then go to "Local Disks" and then "Manage disk partitions", what do you see? Could you post a screenshot?

[Guest manilock]

When i Do that and go to Manage disk partitions i get a new window that opens up and shows nothing

 

when i installed the Os i split my HD 250gigs each way leaveing the other partition unused and installing mandriva on the first i just installed it step by step i do remember only creating one for mandriva "partitions for /," i think thats how it set itself

[theYinYeti]

To run the commands I gave to you, you have to open a “terminal windowâ€, which can be found in the “Tools†menu.

In this window, type:

su - root

and enter root's password when prompted to.

 

From now on, you're the administrator of the machine and you have all rights to cure everything, or to break everything. Double-check anything you type before pressing the [ENTER] key.

 

Becoming root, you'll notice that the end of the command prompt changed from “$†to “#â€.

 

Once you are root, type the commands I gave to you and report the result. If you hilight (select) text in the terminal window, you actually copy it in a special buffer that can be pasted in any other window (such as Firefox' text field) simply by pressing the middle mouse button at the location you want the text to be pasted to.

 

It may be that cfdisk is not installed on your machine; in such case, go to the software manager, check that All applications appear (not just graphical ones), and search for util-linux-ng, and install it.

 

Yves.

[Guest manilock]

Partition Table for /dev/sda

		   First	   Last
# Type	   Sector	  Sector   Offset	Length   Filesystem Type (ID) Flag
-- ------- ----------- ----------- ------ ----------- -------------------- ----
1 Primary		   0   155091509	 63   155091510 Linux (83)		   Boot
  Pri/Log   155091510   312576704	  0   157485195 Free Space		   None
[root@localhost ~]#


		   First	   Last
# Type	   Sector	  Sector   Offset	Length   Filesystem Type (ID) Flag
-- ------- ----------- ----------- ------ ----------- -------------------- ----
1 Primary		   0   155091509	 63   155091510 Linux (83)		   Boot
  Pri/Log   155091510   312576704	  0   157485195 Free Space		   None
[root@localhost ~]# df -k
Filesystem		   1K-blocks	  Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1			 76328256   9838028  62612944  14% /
[root@localhost ~]#

 

And util-linux-ng is installed

[theYinYeti]

That's good news you are posting! This configuration will be easy to deal with. If I understand correctly, you don't intend to install Windows so you want to give the whole drive to Linux. Is that so?

 

So, you seem to have a 150GB drive, split into one 75GB big partition for the /-mount point of Linux and 75GB free space. Out of the 75GB for Linux, you seem to use 9GB, which is a bit more than I'd expect for a root partition alone, so I supose some of that is taken by personal data.

 

I write all that so that you can confirm. Then you'll have to decide what usage you intend this PC for. It is often advisable to keep useless hard drive space unused, so that it can be reclaimed later (for dual boot or such), but maybe you want to store videos or other big files, in which case you'll want to use the whole disk immediately.

 

Were it my own PC, here is what I would do:

— Shrink the / partition to 10GB or so.

— Add a small (1GB?) partition for swap.

— Use part of the remaining space (what would be enough for my personal data) as an LVM partition, in which I would place /home (so that you don't erase your personal data if you have to reinstall the OS).

 

LVM allows you to have dynamic partitions (that can be easily growed), and in particular would allow you in the future to add another hard disk and have partitions that can span both drives. Of course, that's a choice I would do according to my own PC usage, because I do a lot of video processing.

 

Whatever course you choose, you will need a live CD. I recommend Mandriva ONE (because diskdrake is really good), or System Rescue CD (because Gparted is really good too).

 

Yves.