cfdisk

IceGrill · 11-02-2002, 08:56 PM

i have two hard drives: a 30GB with 3 FAT32 partitions, and a small 2 or 4 GB harddrive that i tried to cram linux mandrake 8.2 onto.

now i want to format one of the other partitions to the linux native filesystem to give myself more space for mandrake, however, when i type

cfdisk /dev/hda3 (for 3rd partition on first ide drive)

i get:

FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive

can anyone tell me what is wrong? actually, screw that, i just want to know how to make it work. :)

~Ice

moses · 11-02-2002, 09:17 PM

You are trying to access a partition table on a partition. That's not the
way these things work.

try:

cfdisk /dev/hda

Don't mess with the partitions themselves, work on the partition table
for the entire drive.

IceGrill · 11-02-2002, 09:26 PM

i tried that but got the same error -- ah, i just figured it out. you have to be root. well they could have told me that...

moses · 11-03-2002, 02:10 AM

Yeah, anytime you want to do something that could potentially completely
destroy your computer, you need to be root. . . Don't be root unless you
need to do something dangerous.