gparted says my main partition isn't formatted???

captainxark · 08-05-2008, 04:42 PM

[Fedora 8 XFCE on Compaq Evo 610]

Was formatting a memory stick and noticed that it says the bulk of my hard drive is not formatted. (!)

sda2 has the orange triangle with black exclamation point and when I get information it says that it has unknown file type and is unmounted.

Meanwhile my boot partition is only 200mb and only has 25mb used and i've been installing quite a few things.

df -h:
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
36G 6.9G 30G 19% /
/dev/sda1 190M 19M 162M 11% /boot
tmpfs 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm

I'm pretty sure tmpfs is the flash drive I'm working on.

How did I get through an XFCE installation without a real partition for SDA2?

It's my root (/) drive but it isn't mounted?

TITiAN · 08-05-2008, 06:27 PM

Quote:

df -h:
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
36G 6.9G 30G 19% /
/dev/sda1 190M 19M 162M 11% /boot
tmpfs 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm

obviously, the root partition is not sda2 but /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
tmpfs is a virtual partition in your RAM
df -h doesn't say anything about sda2, but maybe df -ha will do (if sda2 is formatted)

anything i can help with?

captainxark · 08-05-2008, 09:33 PM

Thanks for shedding some light, but the question remains.

Is there any disadvantage to having a name like that instead of sda2?

TITiAN · 08-06-2008, 07:03 AM

Since it is the root partition, I think there isn't. Other devices, like the CD/DVD drive or partable storage might be used from command line (e.g. dd if=/dev/cdrom of=~/image.iso should make an image of a CD). If other people administrate your PC, they might get confused at first. But I think, that's about all the disadvantages.