cannot resize Windows partition (fat)
 

I just installed a new 80G hard drive and put Win2k on a single partition that spanned what should have been the whole hard disk. Now I'm installing Suse 9.0 and am unable to resize the partition. After whatever partitioning tool is default with suse failed, I tried QTParted and it too failed, giving the following messages:

Warning: The partition table on /dev/hde is inconsistent. There are many reasons why this might be the case. Often, the reason is that Linux detected the BIOS geometry incorrectly. However, this does not appear to be the case here. It is safe to ignore,but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders, and may cause problems with FAT file systems. Using LBA is recommended.
Warning: The information sector has the wrong signature (a0d7472).

also:

"an error happened during ped_file_system_resize_call"


I have looked at using fdisk, but even though the info page says that fdisk can resize, I did not see that command (same for cfdisk).

To partition the hard disk initially, I used hte Western Digital software that came with it. It made three partitions, for some reason:

01, /dev/hde-1, 0.03M, free, inactive
02, /dev/hde1, 74M, fat32, active
03, /dev/hde-1, 2.5M, free, inactive

I don't know what's going on, but would really like to make several partitions out of the fat32 partition.

thanks

tim s

A couple of questions: is the Win2K partition NTFS or FAT32 and does the data on the partition have to be saved?

--mascdman

It is fat32 and there is about 6 of the 75G available used. I've run defrag and can safely shrink the partition to at least 30G for the windows partition.

Are these 0.03M, 74M, 2.5M?? or should they have been Gs.

Hey,

Did you span those volumes in Windows? Or is it hardware spanning? It is my understanding that Linux won't understand the software spanning built into Windows.

Just a thought.

-Dave

I notice a lot of sites and mailing lists mentioning parted's "inconsisent partition table" error when using 2.6.x kernels. Does SuSE 9.0 use a 2.6.x kernel?

--mascdman

as far as spanning the partitions, I didn't do it, but it may have been done automatically, whatever spanning partitions means/does. I used the Western Digital software to partition the disk and requested only one partition. Why it did it that way I don't know. Concerning the kernel, Suse 9.0 comes with 2.4__. I'm probably just going to delete all partitions and start over using fdisk or qtparted.