To all: I am a redhat LINUX newbie, and our hardware person has just installed 5 identical new RAID5 drives plus one hot spare (for a total of 7, counting the original drive also) onto a Dell 2650 computer running Red Hat Enterprise WS 3. The RAID installation apparently went fine, and the Dell machine boots and Linux runs on it just like it always has. "fdisk -l" tells me that I have the following device: Disk /dev/sda: 733.4 GB, 733468426240 bytes 255 heads, 63 sector/track, 89172 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 5 40131 de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 * 6 18 104422+ 83 Linux /dev/sda3 19 17580 141066765 83 Linux /dev/sda4 17581 17834 2040255 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 17581 17834 2040223+ 82 Linux swap The size of the device in GB is about what I expected, so I think the hardware is set up okay and Linux recognizes it correctly. I have been asked to add one new partition to this "drive" that uses all of the free space. If I understand correctly, I need to add a new partition, /dev/sda6, starting at 17835 and ending at 89172 with Id = 83 and System = Linux, and should be able to use fdisk to do that. I think I understand fdisk well enough to do this. However, I still have a couple of questions: 1. Do I need to reboot the system into "rescue" mode to do this? Can't I just use fdisk on a running machine as long as I don't mess up the existing partitions? Various documents I find about adding partitions suggest that I must boot into rescue mode to use fdisk for this. (I have a rescue disk, but when I boot from it, even though I specify "linux rescue" at the boot prompt, the system eventually end up going into runlevel 5. I can't figure out how to prevent this.) 2. My reading of the table above indicates that the swap partition overlaps with the extended partition. Am I interpreting this correctly? If I am, is this arrangement normal? Is it desirable? Does it cause any potential problems? I would appreciate any suggestions, help, corrections, or clarifications to my understanding of these concepts. Thanks! - Warren Lamboy -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list