On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 12:32, Stephen Liu wrote:
> Hi Masquared, Matthew, Jay and others,
>
> Thanks for your advice.
>
> I don't understand how the extended partion coming in. The hard drive
> was previously used solely to run RH8.0. I made a clean installation of
> RH9 from its CDs using its GUI partition program to create 4 partitions
> for;
>
> /boot
> /swap
> /root
> /home
>
> no requesting for extended partitiion. After installation the box was
> not running very stable something missing on bottom bar, KStart menu,
> etc. I continued using it waiting for RH10. Until recently the box was
> heavily attacked by Swen/GiFe, the bouncing worms. I built spam filter
> on 'thunderbird', the email software, to catch most of them. Until
> recently the box went collapsed.
>
> Now I am prepared to make another clean installation of RH9.0 on this
> box but I need to reserve 'home' in particular, the 'Thunderbird' mail
> box
>
> /home/user/.thunderbird/default/zoe216nc.slt/Mail
>
> I already create its backup as tarball and backup of other data also as
> tarball as well. I did not creat 'home' backup because I worry there
> are problems.
>
> I tried to find out the designation of /dev/hde4 and /dev/hde5 but
> forget the correct command, whether 'lab /dev/hdeX' or 'label /dev/hdeX
> showing that it is home/root/boot/ etc.
>
> Could you please shed me some light. Thanks
When you look at your listing below note that /dev/hde4 and /dev/hde5
have the same starting and ending cylinders. They are virtually the
same space on the disk except for the extra information needed in hde4
to describe the "extenstion".
While you didn't ask for it to be created....It Will Be Created....for
the very reasons others have told you. You *really* only have 4 usable
partitions. 3 of them have Linux file systems and one is Linux Swap.
You can actually get a little it more information if you run parted and
print the partition table...like so...
(parted) select /dev/sda
Using /dev/sda
Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/sda is
30401/255/63. Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 8032.499M.
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-238475.179 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
1 0.031 99998.349 primary ext3 boot
2 99998.350 101998.630 primary ext3
4 101998.630 236480.251 extended lba
5 101998.661 114000.314 logical ext3
6 114000.346 116996.813 logical ext3
3 236480.251 238472.688 primary linux-swap
If you look closely at the above you will notice that there is quite a
bit of unassigned space on this disk. From 116996.813 to 236480.250 has
no file system. You'll also note the minor numbers are not consecutive.
This happens.... There isn't anything wrong and there isn't anything to
be concerned about. When I make a file system for the unused space it
will get added into the extended partition.
Another command of value is e2label it tells you the "label" *BUT* that
doesn't mean that is what it is used for....just it happens that most
people like to follow a convention and will do something like...
[root@misty tars]# e2label /dev/sda2
/opt1
And then you look in the /etc/fstab you will find....
LABEL=/opt1 /opt ext3 defaults 1 2
Which simply says take the partition with label of /opt1 and mount it on
/opt. I did that since I've an old disk that has partition labeled /opt
but I've got that mounted /var/spool/mqueue or some such thing....
Oh, just for fun....
[root@misty etc]# e2label /dev/sda4
e2label: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
while trying to open /dev/sda4
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.
So you couldn't mount it if you wanted to....
Ed
>
> B.R.
> Stephen
>
>
>
> å ä, 2003-12-05 02:03, Msquared åéï
> > On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 12:50:32AM +0800, Stephen Liu wrote:
> >
> > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> > > /dev/hde1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
> > > /dev/hde2 14 78 522112+ 82 Linux swap
> > > /dev/hde3 79 736 5285385 83 Linux
> > > /dev/hde4 737 1245 4088542+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> > > /dev/hde5 737 1245 4088511 83 Linux
> > >
> > > According to my recollection I only created 4 partitions
> >
> > The primary partition table on the disk can only contain four partitions.
> > If you want more than that, you must create one of those partitions as a
> > sort of partition container. The partition container is a partition that
> > contains more partitions (secondary partitions).
> >
> > A simple rule of thumb is that if you make more than 3 partitions, the
> > additional ones should be secondary partitions. Having four partitions
> > under that rule of thumb is an odd case, since obviously 4 partitions fits
> > nicely into the four primary partitions. :-) *shrug* One of those
> > things...
> >
> > Something odd: if you create one primary partition and one secondary
> > partition, you'll probably end up with hda1 and hda5, since hda4 will be
> > the partition used to create the secondary partition container. I don't
> > know if partition 4 (hda4) is the only one that can be a secondary
> > partition container, or if that's just by convention.
> >
> > I hope that clears up the mystery for you.
> >
> > Regards, Msquared...
> >
--
"An opinion is like an asshole - everybody has one."
- Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan, The Dead Pool - 1988.
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