Hi,
Background: first, I am a nearly brand-new Linux user. I have SUSE 10.1 installed on a PC that was given to me by a friend. It has a very small (by today's standards) hard drive. I notice that when SUSE installs, it partitions my hard drive. Post-installation, I can see that I have hda6 and hda7. It seems that there are many more installed directories on hda6. Right now, hda6 is 75.7% full, and the space on hda7 is only a tiny bit used up-it seems to only have a copy of the directory that is named after my SUSE user name. I say "copy" because hda6 also has the same directory. My questions are: 1) why is there two instances of the same directory on my PC-one on hda6 and one on hda7? 2) how can I get more use out of hda7? I discovered that I can't install many at all of the 183+ updates available to me because when I start to install them, I QUICKLY get a message that says that if I download/install them, I'll be out of available hard disk space.

run df -h in a terminal to see what disk space has free space, compare that is /etc/fstab to see if anything is unmounted, you may also want to run cfdisk to see if fstab is missing any disk partitions.

usually disk partitions are setup based on the individual's wants & needs, maybe a few people will post their setup to give you a better perspective, mine is as follows:

bash-3.1$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 927M 308M 573M 35% /
/dev/hda2 5.5G 1.9G 3.4G 36% /usr
/dev/hda6 23G 3.3G 19G 15% /home

not listed is my swap partition on /dev/hda5 which is 1 gig in size

i have other disks but i did not list them to keep this simple...

NOTE: before using any of Linux's disk tools to change/create/delete/re-create any disk partitions you need to un-mount them all first - you have been warned!

save any data to CD-R or memstick before doing any modifications to your harddrive as dataloss can and will occur...

on another note, when i do any disk modifications i use a live CD like Slax or R.I.P.