First of all, I'm really quite clueless. I was given a little server that my boss wasn't using and figured I'd use it to learn Linux. It was going swimmingly until recently.

I had installed Fedora and it worked fine.

I decided to try straight Ubuntu, so I installed that and life was still good.

But when I decided to go back to Fedora, something got all kinds of messed up. At first all I got was a blinking cursor. When I tried to re-install Ubuntu it wouldn't work. It gets to a point in the install where it won't go forward. It just goes back and forth between 2 screens.

Anyway, I tried Fedora again and got it to work after taking out 2 hard drives leaving only a single 1TB drive. But now when I boot there are 2 Fedora's to choose from and when I choose the first and I look at the drives, it looks like 4 partitions and I don't understand why. I certainly don't know how to fix it.

There's a screenshot here

When I look at disk usage it shows that I'm using 17% of my 54 GB but I would have expected it to recognize the drive as 1tb.

I'm extremely new and have no idea what to make of this so any help at all is much appreciated.

not showing actual out put of command used to get your disk size. I can't make out that image either. But to take an educated guess. did you format before installing any of them? if you install over top you're going to have issues - I've never done that just to see how screwed up it'd get. (might put that on my bucket list).


You might want to slow down, and try it again. Using their partitioning to wipe the drive completely then repartitioning it. You can go with the entire disk for root and home or split it into two for root and home. I'd pick the later.

most like Fedora and Ubuntutututu have this little almost hidden option during install when you get to the part where you tell it where you want to install it called "do something else" (some installs call it expert mode) select that and this is where you can control the partitioning of your hdd. wipe everything, set it up - some still put a swap on their systems, if swap remember to figure that into your equation on how you decide to install your system 1, 2, or 3 partitions.

swap, root (which provides a home) or swap, root, /home separately.

If you want a dual boot or tri- boot or more then well you might just want to stick with one boot for now... until you get familiar with Linux.

LVM is Logical Volume Manager, which lets the system worry about partitions. Personally, I'm old school and detest it, but you can stop worrying until something tells you it's out of space.

One of the issues with LVM is that it's capable of combining disks. I advise you to either reinstall with no lvm, or learn how to control it. LVM_examples

So, what does it look like when you choose the second Fedora?

You should be able to re-install form Live CD. When asked about the disk partitions just tell it to use the whole drive. Then you will see used and the whole drive as being 1TB.

The layout is fine - and the disk is being recognised as 1T. If you follow the link posted in #3, download the whole manual - it's an excellent explanation of LVM and how to use it.
Most of the disk is in partition 2 - the LVM PV - this is where everything except /boot is. It is a container for /dev/fedora/root (54 Gig), /dev/fedora/swap (8.4 Gig), and /dev/fedora/home (937 Gig) - that last one is where all your stuff will go; photos, videos, downloads, everything. More than enough space. Go to a terminal and run this - post the output.
As for the other disks, you need to clear out the boot code - I do that from an external caddy/USB connector. Do you have one ?.

The previous installation was still there even after installing Ubuntu because you didn't format the partition before reinstalling. After the bad installation of Ubuntu, I perceive from what you've said that the boot loader couldn't distinguish whether to boot the Red Hat boot loader or Ubuntu. Although, this should have been done automatically, if you installed the Ubuntu on top of Fedora well.

Display the command for us to help you with the presumed four (4) partitions that you are claiming to have. The screen shot shows two disk drives one with two partitions and the other with three (3) Logical drives.
Also you could display the output of this command:

If you're unable to boot into the OS proper, get a LiveCD and run your system with the LiveCD inserted into your DVD/CD drive. Then boot from this device by setting the Boot order priority in the BIOS.

You've used 'fedora' to rename the conventional hda**. One of the partition is a swap and should not be used to store documents by the user.

On the subject of LVM, that's a great idea on a server although it has disadvantages on a PC with just one drive. If you want to learn about Linux as a server system, Fedora + LVM is a good idea.

The post by acescript has major errors caused by a poor knowledge of Linux, specifically LVM and file systems.

Actually there is only one physical 1 TB drive. The three logical partitions are LVM partitions inside the large LVM PV partition on the only disk drive.

The OP didn't rename anything. This is an LVM system and fedora is the name of the LVM volume group given by the Anaconda installer. You can find this out by typing sudo vgs or sudo vgdisplay for more detail.

The three device files /dev/fedora/root, /dev/fedora/swap, /dev/fedora/home are actually symlinks to device mapper (dm) nodes. You can find this out by typing ls -l /dev/fedora.

The two physical partitions /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 still exist of course as seen on the screenshot. The small /boot partition is selected and labeled "Device /dev/sda1". The large LVM PV partition is /dev/sda2.

By the way drives in Linux are now named sdX The "conventional hda**" hasn't been used for about a decade since the Linux SCSI driver now handles SATA drives as well.

There is no way for a user to write to a swap partition as it isn't mounted as a filesystem that could be written to by users. This is a non-issue.

Considering your poor knowledge of Linux you should be simply reading posts and learning about Linux yourself at this point acescript. You don't know enough yet to answer a post such as this.

Thanks for those highlight.

Beside the most important thing is for the person to be able to resolve the issue in which clues have already been given by using the liveCD (run those command in the terminal).

The sd**/hd** convention seems to have been modified in some distros.

The HDD shows two pieces of information, the first is the summary of the HDD, with the first partition as the boot partition and the other one shows the logical drives (54 GB + 8.4 GB + 937 GB = 999.4 GB), which is what you find in the second partition (partition 2).

Anyways, lets know if you've been able to resolve the issue.