Guest FenestraeNunquam Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 I wanted to get rid of my win98 partitions (I did) and re-install 9.0 over the old 9.0 installation I already had. I didn't have any important data or anything - so a new install wouldn't hurt anything. Anyway, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when the partion questions came up. I tried to partition over win98 (I think that did work ok) and for the other partitions - well, I just clicked on Wizard or something like that and let it do whatever it does. Then I proceeded thru the rest of the install and it appeared to be sucessful and stuff seems to work. But I haven't really done anything yet except play a few games, and browse the internet. How can I tell if I have my entire H-D available, and if the partitioning and formatting went ok? I mean, it appears that mandrake is telling me (under the software install rpmdrake) that I have 4GB available. Well, I have a 40GB hard drive with only mandrake 9.0 on it. So I'm thinking I goofed up all the disk partitioning. How do I tell ? :? I know this seems like a moronic question, but I've been off linux for quite a while. so I'm basically looking for something like under windoze where you right click on your C: and select Properties and get the info something like "40Gb disk, 6Gb used...". And if I did goof up, can I fix it now, or do I need to reinstall? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scoopy Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 try this from terminal as root #diskdrake You can find this also in Mandrake Control Center under mount points... but be carefull in there. You will be able to resize partitions in there too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest FenestraeNunquam Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 there's another post here that has got me scared of diskdrake: http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=6325 I was just wondering where in mandrake you can see what your partitions are and how much H-D you have. Like in windoze where you right-click on C: drive and can see all the directories and the size of C and the space used and the space available... I have a feeling that since I partitioned over my win98 area, that Mandrake used that for the actual mandrake system, but the other partitions may be -0- bytes... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 diskdrake can be good. just be carefull. i wrote that post in anger. to find out space and stuff: df for me @james >>> df Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda6 2.0G 1.8G 165M 92% / /dev/hda1 2.0G 1.3G 640M 66% /home /dev/hda5 894M 639M 211M 76% /home/james/music /dev/hda7 945M 440M 457M 50% /mnt/windows /mnt/windows DOE NOT CONTAIN WINDOWS and never had. It is named like that because i couldn't be stuffed naming it in diskdrake. It is a play partition with Peanut Linux on it. I was bored!! As James Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kmack Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 If you run KDE you can also see it from K--Configuration--KDE---Information---Storage Devices and you get a nice little graphical display. I think Gnome has a similar program, but I don't use it so not real sure what it is called. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glitz Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 If you have any partitions that aren't mounted they will not show up when issuing the df command. However, any "holes" in the drive assignments should be noticable. Can you show us what df outputs? Glitz. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest FenestraeNunquam Posted August 29, 2003 Report Share Posted August 29, 2003 thanks guys. I'll do that when I get home. I'm at work now, so I'm supposed to be working, at least theoretically.. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest FenestraeNunquam Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 df shows: File system 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda1 5542276 1775128 3485612 34% / /dev/hda6 33783976 36704 33747272 1% /home Ok, I don't know what I'm talking about, but I can see that I'm using around 5.5Gb for / and around 33.7Gb for /home. That would be the reason that when I get into rpmdrake to look at software packages, it tells me I only have a little over 3Gb space available - cuz /home is hogging up the whole disk... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 Yup, if you let diskdrake 'Auto Allocate' at install, you'll typically get a huge /home directory and not enough space to do squat in /usr or /. You have two choices: 1. Use DiskDrake to resize /home down to a more reasonable level and create a /usr partition 2. Reinstall. (I don't mind telling it to 'Auto Allocate', but I always look to see what it does, write down the sizes of the partitions it creates and then clear the info and make them more reasonable....it just gives me an idea of what relative sizes / and /usr should be). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest FenestraeNunquam Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 I don't mind re-installing. The only reason I chose "expert" the first time was to get rid of my win98 partition, and I guess that worked ok. Now, since I don't really know what I'm doing with partitions yet, I wonder if - now that win98 is gone - if I reinstall but choose "recommended" instead of "expert" - will mandrake create all the other partitions automatically, and make /home a reasonable size? If I choose an "Install" instead of an "Upgrade" I mean. Or do I have to do another "expert" install? The last time I partitioned a hard drive was back in the late-80s on a PC with DOS - think it was called "fdisk" or something. Since my DOS days, I've been pointing and clicking in windoze and maybe my brain has atrophied from non-use. :) thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 cfdisk is pretty friendly for a CLI, certainly more than fdisk (which is the same in linux but more like expert mode) Anyway, cfdisk is self explanatory and Ive never had a problem loosing stuff like diskdrake. Sometimes it won't open a partition etc. and then you have to use fdisk and usually in expert... but its never allowed me to open something then mess up on writing the partition table and leave me in the middel of nowhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 I wonder if - now that win98 is gone - if I reinstall but choose "recommended" instead of "expert" - will mandrake create all the other partitions automatically, and make /home a reasonable size? If I choose an "Install" instead of an "Upgrade" I mean. Or do I have to do another "expert" install? You have to do expert if you want complete control. If you reinstall, ML will most likely just use what's already there which will defeat your wanting to resize. Also, df can show you the type [root@localhost home]# df -Th Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda6 reiserfs 2.3G 1.6G 737M 68% / /dev/hda1 vfat 13G 7.8G 5.0G 62% /mnt/c /dev/hda7 ext3 4.1G 2.0G 2.0G 51% /mnt/rh /dev/hda8 reiserfs 4.9G 1.8G 3.2G 36% /mnt/d /dev/hda9 reiserfs 4.5G 3.1G 1.4G 70% /mnt/share [root@localhost home]# so can my favorite...parted [root@localhost home]# parted -i GNU Parted 1.6.4 Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. Using /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc is 3736/255/63. Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 8032.499M. (parted) print Disk geometry for /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 0.000-29311.734 megabytes Disk label type: msdos Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags 1 0.031 13005.747 primary fat32 boot 2 13005.747 29306.074 extended lba 5 13005.778 13303.828 logical linux-swap 6 13303.859 15578.657 logical reiserfs 7 15578.688 19798.857 logical ext3 8 19798.888 24795.637 logical reiserfs 9 24795.668 29306.074 logical reiserfs (parted) q Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary. [root@localhost home]# parted options [root@localhost home]# parted --help Usage: parted [OPTION]... [DEVICE [COMMAND [PARAMETERS]...]...] Apply COMMANDs with PARAMETERS to DEVICE. If no COMMAND(s) are given, runs in interactive mode. OPTIONs: -h, --help displays this help message -i, --interactive where necessary, prompts for user intervention -s, --script never prompts for user intervention -v, --version displays the version COMMANDs: check MINOR do a simple check on the filesystem cp [FROM-DEVICE] FROM-MINOR TO-MINOR copy filesystem to another partition help [COMMAND] prints general help, or help on COMMAND mklabel LABEL-TYPE create a new disklabel (partition table) mkfs MINOR FS-TYPE make a filesystem FS-TYPE on partititon MINOR mkpart PART-TYPE [FS-TYPE] START END make a partition mkpartfs PART-TYPE FS-TYPE START END make a partition with a filesystem move MINOR START END move partition MINOR name MINOR NAME name partition MINOR NAME print [MINOR] display the partition table, or a partition quit exit program rescue START END rescue a lost partition near START and END resize MINOR START END resize filesystem on partition MINOR rm MINOR delete partition MINOR select DEVICE choose the device to edit set MINOR FLAG STATE change a flag on partition MINOR [root@localhost home]# Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest FenestraeNunquam Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 Ok thanks for all that. Before I got bvc's post I was already sitting in the middle of a re-install (my 3rd). It told me my partitions were screwed up and it couldn't proceed unless I wiped them all out), so I said ok to wipe out the partitions. So now it is sitting at the Filesystems/Format partitions screen and I now have one giant "empty" hda. I'll let it sit at that step until one of you guys tell me what to choose. Its waiting for me to click "create" and then I can choose the type, size, mount point, etc. Thats what I need to know for what to choose. Or maybe I can just select "auto allocate" and then adjust if necessary (as Steve says). I just want it to make what I need to have a working linux system that I can learn on. So all I need now is what to choose for this step. The rest of the install is easy. thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 I'm not sure I understand what you d/k :? You just stated the steps yourself. Do you want to know sizes? You definately need a / /home swap Size depends on what you want to do. Just a normal desktop?...all on a 40GB hd? That's a major waste IMO! I'd /=4GB to 7GB This will give you enough space to install everything, AND compile XFree86 and the kernel at the same time :lol: ...if that's possible. /home=1GB to 5GB and up, depending on what you want to keep there, I guess. I make my /home very small and keep all my goodies on /mnt/share (see below). swap=? depends on the amount of RAM you have. To be safe; swap=250 should be more than enough if you have 128MB. The general rule is >swap=twice the RAM Then if you don't care about the rest of the space, just make it mount point=/mnt/share and make it a fat32 if you want to make sharing easy/hassle free (less secure). Does this help any? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest FenestraeNunquam Posted August 31, 2003 Report Share Posted August 31, 2003 I did what bvc suggested in the above post (I chose Auto Allocate, and then I adjusted to what bvc suggested). It seemed to work fine. It prompted me for the various CDs, and went thru the rest of the install, and finally got to the "update" from mirrors option. I said ok, and selected a mirror, that went ok, then it finally said Congratulations - Install complete. When it rebooted, well I just got tons of errors - fs errors - fix y or n. "error reading block so & so resulted in short read blah blah" It just won't go from there. So, what I'm going to do is just wait for 9.2 and try to do a recommend install from that. I'll just leave this box dead for the time being. When I fooled around with 8.1 a couple of years ago, I don't remember having too much trouble. Of course, back then I already had win98 on the box, so maybe that helps mandrake. I don't have alot of time or patience for fooling around with just installing something. I have a full time job, and am taking 2 college courses, and on top of that I'm learning O-O programming & learning java (i'm a former cobol programmer), and last but not least I have a family. So this mandrake experience was just a little something I wanted to do on the side of all the other stuff I have going on. I guess I just don't have the time to mess with it right now. I'm kind of ticked off that it accepted the sizes of /, /home, swap, and /mnt/share without any problem and then proceeded to make me swap CDs for 30 minutes or so, then made me wait 30 more minutes for the "update" from the mirrors to finish. Then it has the nerve to tell me "congratulations you've installed mandrake" when in reality it won't even boot after all that time wasted installing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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