Hello,
I've been running a dual boot system (Win98 & Linux RedHat) for a couple of years. The system has a single hdd of 30Gb which I partitioned using FIPS when I installed Linux. I created two partitions for the Linux, one small for boot and one other, totalling about 5Gb. The Windows partition has never used more than 7 of the 25ish Gb allocated to it and I thought it would be a good idea to claim more for Linux use. Accordingly I ran FIPS this afternoon and created another 5Gb partition. Everything seems to function well with the original Windows and Linux partitions but when I tried to run cfdisk in Linux to format the new partition I got a fatal error. I tried fdisk and got something similar. They were unable to open hda.
A careful re-reading of the FIPS documentation drew my attention to the following sentence :- "If you want to use the new partition under Linux, you may now change the system indicator byte with Linux' fdisk, then use MKFS."
Clearly I cannot do that since fdisk and his brother will not run. Can I change the system indicator byte by editing a file, and if so will this get (c)fdisk working? Is there another route to formatting and pressing the new partition into service? Have I missed something very elementary? Should I go back to the abacus and master that before playing with big boys toys?
On another but obviously not unrelated matter. I am very much in favour of some form of structured introduction to Linux and its many facets as proposed in recent communications to this list. I say that as one who is not an IT professional but a casual user. I am strongly attracted to the Free Software movement on philosophical grounds and because it provides an alternative to the highly unpalatable antics of the major players in the SOHO* industry. The rapid development of Linux is both exciting and overwhelming for people such as myself, and I suspect that it is people such as myself who will need to feel that Linux is not only a good thing but a straight forward thing to use, before it provides a major challenge to the present giants of the industry. But more of than anon if anyone wishes to pursue the matter with a mere foot soldier.
The important thing is my poor marooned partition.
Cheers
Dave Crease
PS * Isn't it odd how time changes the meaning of words. In the 1960s the anything related to SOHO was not for discussion in polite company! D
On Sat, 16 Nov 2002 19:46:47 -0000 "David Crease" david@creases.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
Hello,
I've been running a dual boot system (Win98 & Linux RedHat) for a couple of years. The system has a single hdd of 30Gb which I partitioned using FIPS when I installed Linux. I created two partitions for the Linux, one small for boot and one other, totalling about 5Gb. The Windows partition has never used more than 7 of the 25ish Gb allocated to it and I thought it would be a good idea to claim more for Linux use. Accordingly I ran FIPS this afternoon and created another 5Gb partition. Everything seems to function well with the original Windows and Linux partitions but when I tried to run cfdisk in Linux to format the new partition I got a fatal error. I tried fdisk and got something similar. They were unable to open hda.
Any chance of posting the error message?
One possibility would simply be permissions on the /dev/hda device file - you are running fdisk and/or cfdisk as root aren't you?
The other possibility would be that the partition table on that hard disk has become corrupt. This is not a disaster as it can probably be reconstructed but that may be rather hard over e-mail.
Related to this, some disks have use geometry translation to cope with various silly limits in the IDE interface and the BIOS and these translation schemes can sometimes cuse problems when one system know about the translations and the other doesn't.
Steve.
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David Crease -
Steve Fosdick