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#1 2010-07-04 10:44:25

looseonthelime
Member
Registered: 2010-07-04
Posts: 14

endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

hello,

i am dualbooting windows and arch to slowly "ease" into linux. wouldnt really call it in easing though, as it is proving far more time-consuming and troubling than i ever expected. previously i thought i was good with computer, but the sharp knife of arch has taught me i am merely an infant crawling in very uncharted territories.

either way, i have a 500gb harddrive in a 3 year old hp nc8430. i have partitioned as following

/dev/sda1 - win (ntfs) 60gb
/dev/sda2 - boot (ext2) -100mb
/dev/sda3 - root (ext3) - 60 gb
/dev/sda4 - extended partition (it says W95 LBA)
/dev/sda5 - swap (logical) - 2gb
/dev/sda6 - storage, meant to be "shared between linux and win" (fat32) - 350gb or something

after creating all this i booted from a partition magic 8 cd to check the partitions, it said the extended partition needed to be an extendedX partition. never heard of it before, but read somewhere that fdisk cant create large extended and logical partitions very well. is this true? eitherway, rebooted into the PM cd and now when i looked at my disk it just says error #108 over it (and also reports som unallocated space).

also, if i look at fdisk -l it tells me my 3 primary paritions and the extended dont end on cylinder boundary, which what i grasp from searches is the source of the error #108. since i cant get into the partitions with PM anymore due to the error, i need to use fdisk. but the more i read on the net the more it seems fdisk simply cant create safe partitions. what should i use? i have reinstalled this system 3 times the last 2 days because different errors. i'm learning loads on the way, but if i'm gonna do it again i want it to be right. prefereably i would like to fix it without deleting partitions and starting from the beginning, but i guess i have no choice. so if i do this, how should i do it? is there any good way to partition drives with Linux or should i use Partition Magic somehow?

also, is it ok to have the swap drive on a logical partition?

Last edited by looseonthelime (2010-07-04 10:46:21)

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#2 2010-07-04 10:56:01

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

I find cfdisk the best myself - and the fdisk man page also recommends cfdisk. smile

Boot the arch installer, don't run setup, use cfdisk to delete all partitions (except sda1 of course) and start again.

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#3 2010-07-04 11:30:33

looseonthelime
Member
Registered: 2010-07-04
Posts: 14

Re: endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

i think i made the partitions using cfdisk since i made them during the arch install.

and since partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary i have to remove that as well dont i?

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#4 2010-07-04 12:51:10

Mektub
Member
From: Lisbon /Portugal
Registered: 2008-01-02
Posts: 647

Re: endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

looseonthelime,

also, is it ok to have the swap drive on a logical partition?

No problem. My disk looks like this:

/dev/sda1   *           1        2664    21398548+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            2665        2792     1028160   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            2793        4513    13823932+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4            4514       58115   430558065    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            4514        5023     4096543+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6            5024        7638    21004956   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            7639       44159   293354901   83  Linux
/dev/sda8           44160       54357    81915403+  83  Linux
/dev/sda9           54358       58115    30186103+  83  Linux

I used gparted live for the partitioning, never had a problem, so I can't figure out what is happening to you.

Gparted is here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

Since you are at it, give it a try.

Mektub


Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/johnbina

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#5 2010-07-04 13:02:46

litemotiv
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 5,026

Re: endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

never, NEVER use partition magic on ANY drive, that's the best advice i can give anyone, really.

if it's okay to reinstall your whole system and you want to use a similar partition scheme, this is a straightforward way:

- boot windows installation
- remove all the existing partititions in windows install, create 1 primary 60gb partition and install there
- reboot and start arch installer (cfdisk)
- create 1 extended partition with 4 logical drives,  128mb linux (/boot), 20gb linux (/), 2gb swap, rest of space linux (/home)
- continue as normal

if you don't need a separate boot or swap partition it's even simpler, then you can create 3 or 4 primary partitions in cfdisk.


ᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ

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#6 2010-07-04 20:08:31

looseonthelime
Member
Registered: 2010-07-04
Posts: 14

Re: endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

mektub,

didnt know i could boot from logical partitions... thought boot and root partitions had to be primary. running the setup i outlined above, should be fine though eh? when is it ok to skip the swap drive? i have 3 gigs ram running 64 bit system. can i skip the swap in the future?

i have managed to fix my problem. i deleted partition sda2-sda6 and then ran partition magic again (sorry litemotiv, didnt see your post until now). this time it enlightened me of the same problem of weird cylinders, sectors and what not. i guess this time, since there was only one partition, it managed to fix it. i booted from my arch cd and ran fdisk -l just to be sure it didnt complain about cylinder boundaries again. after that i installed linux with same setup as above and it seems to be working fine. i'm assuming the error surfaced from a shitty windows partition, and then when i used cfdisk to create the remaining partitions the wonky cylinder boundaries carried over to all of the following partitions...

decided to skip fat32 as somehow i had managed to oppress all its weaknesses (namely limited volume size of partition in some OS and limited file size) and when they all came flying back i realised it wont do. formatted the sda6 storage partition as ext3 with inode size of 128 so i could use ext2_fs driver in windows to read it. seems to be working brilliantly.

going to be storing loads of info on that, so if anyone knows of any problems with the driver, please let me know!

furthermore, does anyone know any excellent resources to read up more about general harddrive info, such as clusters, cylinders, inode sizes etc etc except wikipedia. realised i need to soak up some knowledge in that area.

sorry for the long post. take care.

eh, how do i mark a thread as solved?

Last edited by looseonthelime (2010-07-04 20:12:06)

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#7 2010-07-04 20:18:38

looseonthelime
Member
Registered: 2010-07-04
Posts: 14

Re: endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

litemotiv wrote:

never, NEVER use partition magic on ANY drive, that's the best advice i can give anyone, really.

Ok, but what should i use to create the really large extended partitions. is there such a thing as extendedx partitions, or is that just something that partition magic has made up? just realised it says my extended partition is a Ext'd W95 partition, even though the two logical partitions it contains are Linux (one swap, one ext3)...

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#8 2010-07-04 20:47:36

vacant
Member
From: downstairs
Registered: 2004-11-05
Posts: 816

Re: endless problems with my harddrive, partitioning and filesystems

I don't know what long term view you are taking here. Maybe you should consider logical volumes, maybe full encryption?

I've been quite happy with this setup of three primary partitions for quite some time:

/dev/sda1   *           1        4013    32234391    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            4014        4031      144585   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            4032       14593    84839265   8e  Linux LVM

I've got Win XP on sda1, linux boot on sda2 and sda3?

sda3 is luks-encrypted. Once I've typed in a long password at boot the partition has LVM2 logical partitions which I can change as needed. At present I have:

/dev/mapper/vg-arch on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,commit=20,commit=0)
/dev/mapper/vg-home on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,commit=20,commit=0)
/dev/mapper/vg-store on /mnt/store type ext4 (rw,noatime,commit=20,commit=0)
/dev/mapper/vg-vid on /mnt/vid type ext4 (rw,noatime,commit=20,commit=0)

With 2 GB or RAM I gave up swap ages ago (use a swap file rather than a swap partition).

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