A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the second partition of my hard drive was only showing a partition size of 70GB. When I first installed Windows xp I setup the drive to have the 500GB split up so that the boot partition was 137 and approx. 363GB for the second partition. I used the partitioning tool in Mandriva Control Center to examine the partitions. I see that I have a 267GB partition that has: Type: Linux Logical Volume Manager (0x8e) I also have windows 70GB partition

What I don't understand is that I have Mandriva installed on a separate physical drive. I have been experimenting with different Linux distros.(installing,running and then removing the distro) All of them have been installed on a seperate physical drive. I was wondering how this 267GB partition got on my windows drive. I copied all the info about the 3 partitions that are showing on this windows drive below:

I'm currently running Mandriva 2009 and winxp with service pack 3



hard drive description from partition tool in Mandriva:

sdb

1st partition (of windows drive)

/media/hd2

Details

Mount point: media/hd2
Device: sdb
UUID .127EF0678EE785
DOS drive letter: c(just a guess)
Type: NTFS-3G(0X7)
Start: sector 63
Size 127 GB(27%), 268430022 sectors
Cylinder 0 to 16708
Mounted
Partition booted by default
(for MS-DOS boot, not for lilo)

/

Details 2nd partition(of windows drive)

Device: sdb
Volume Label NEW VOLUME
UUID .6424A5D124A5A710
DOS drive letter: D(just a guess)
Type: NTFS-3G(0X7)
Start: sector 268430148
Size 70 GB(15%), 147781872 sectors
Cylinder 16709 to 25907
Mounted



Details 3rd partition(of windows drive)

Device: sdb7
UUID: pQ3uK1-FI3j-K8W5-8iTB-PeWg-WDz2-o12gSU
Type: Linux Logical Volume Manager (0x8e)
Start Sector 416613708
Size: 267GB(57%), 560154357 sectors
Cylinder 25933 to 60800


If I do something to this partition in the partitioning app of Mandriva Control Center will it disturb my Mandriva install? disturb my windows install? Can I just simply delete this partition? What size a partition does the Linux Logical Volume Manager need? Could I safely resize the LInux Volume Manager? Would this free up space on the windows drive?

Your output looks weird. Perhaps you went back and forward a bit in the partition tool. Open a terminal, su to root, and type

fdisk -l

Post the output. It's more thorough then what you have. NTFS, btw is linux user advice; It stands for Not This File System :-). When you inevitably have to reinstall windows, you might change that to vfat32

Here's the output:


Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x317f0b0b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1019 8185086 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1020 30401 236010915 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1020 1528 4088511 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 1529 30401 231922341 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x22ba8210

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 16709 134215011 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 16710 60801 354168990 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5 16710 25908 73890936 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb6 25909 25933 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 25934 60801 280077178+ 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdc: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0a861d0d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 30401 244196001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdd: 258 MB, 258998272 bytes
16 heads, 32 sectors/track, 988 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 512 * 512 = 262144 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 1 988 252903+ 6 FAT16
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(999, 15, 32) logical=(987, 15, 32)

Why would you want to do that? Windows is just fine with NTFS.
Perhaps you meant that a SHARED DATA partition could be FAT32??? That's a good approach, but I prefer EXT3 for all shared data.

But--back to the topic:

What you see is what you get...(Got). You might not think that you created those Linux partitions, but obviously **someone** did.

And-veering off again: For multiboot with 2 drives, I prefer all OSes on one drive, and shared data on the other.

Way back in the day, hard drives had 17 sectors per track. In an effort to increase areal density of hard disk, manufacturers resorted to "zoned bit recording" which increases the amount of sectors per track towards the outer edge of the platters.
Because a drive speed is constant, and there are more sectors flying by the read/write heads towards the outer edge of the drive, the fastest part of a drive is the first partition.
If you prefer to run an optimized system, and you're like most guys and you love speed, you may want to rethink your layout strategy when you have more than one drive.

Seeing how you're offering "off topic" advice, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and I'll throw some in also.

The main thing I want to know is will removing or resizing the 286 gb partition (/dev/sdb7 25934 60801 280077178+ 8e Linux LVM) affect windows xp? If it would only affect my Linux drive(Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes)that wouldn't be so bad because it is a lot easier to reinstall than win xp.

XP won't care - it won't even see it.
Don't try resizing it (the LVM) - especially from Windoze (PM seems to create more problems than it solves). It probably has logical volumes in it, and they need to be managed first.
If you just want to delete it and risk a (Linux) re-install, I'd say go right ahead.

To answer your question - NO. It should not affect windows xp if you move the boundary between sdb6 and sdb7, increasing one and reducing the other.
If you don't have the same filesystems there, however, you might end up with a patch of disk without a filesystem on it. Never having done it except on empty disks, I don't know.

I presume sdd is a usb drive of some sort - otherwise it's decidedly suspicious (32 sectors/track, etc).

Well your comment that the "I presume sdd is a usb drive of some sort - otherwise it's decidedly suspicious (32 sectors/track, etc"). is interesting, but it's a usb flash drive. What do you mean by decidedly suspicious?


I'm not really sure what you mean by "if you move the boundary between sdb6 and sdb7". I'm looking at the options from the partitioning tool in the Mandriva Control Center. When I click on a partition. It gives me these four options:

1)Resize
2)Format
3)Add to LVM
4)Delete

I was thinking that selecting resize would be the safest since the partition would not be deleted. Therefore,I could reclaim a lot of the space of the drive back? Is this correct reasoning?

On sdd: Every ide disk I ever met had 63 sectors/track. If it was a physical hard disk, the drive specs would be wrong.

You have 'only 70G left' on your drive and this started this post. I have 2 distros, slackware & fedora with common boot and home dirs in 50 Gigs of my 160G and the rest unformatted. Hee's the output of df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 15G 4.0G 9.5G 30% /
/dev/hda1 92M 26M 62M 30% /boot
/dev/hda5 14G 3.4G 9.6G 27% /home
/dev/hda6 14G 3.9G 8.8G 31% /fedora

I would not get concerned about 70 Gigs left. I spoke specifically about moving the boundary between sdb6 and sdb7 to avoid misunderstandings if you were a noob. Resize if you like. I would also suggest examine the output of df -h on your box and replan how to use your vast space. Then do it, and back up first.

Well. let me start off by saying I am a noob when it comes to Linux and many other things about the computer. As far as the 70GB is concerned, this is has presented the problem. Not only is the partition showing a size of 70GB, that partition has only about a gig of that 70GB left.

This may be a little off the original topic but I've started to explore something you mentioned in your post. When I installed Mandriva I was a little confused about the different setups so I just went ahead and used the entire drive, thinking that later I could explore ways to setup that additional space.

I'm at the control center of Mandriva using their partitioning tool. I've clicked on the drive I have Mandriva installed(sda)
After clicking on create partition, I'm given 5 options:

1)Start sector
2)Size in MB
3)Filesystem type
4)Mount point
5)Preference

If I want to use the additional space on the drive for saved files, what do I select for the filesystem type? It has journalised FS: ext3 It has as mount point /usr Should I select that? It has 3 entries under preference:
1)Extended
2)Primary
3)Extended _0x85
Which of these should I select?