Dear Friends ,
Im having winxp and i tried to install Redhat in dual boot , i made partition by PartitionMagic, i created a 8gb drive for RedHat and made it ext2 filesyayetm , but my Redhat dont detect it i tried so many times , and finally again when i tried to delete that drive , i can see that all the space hasnt recoverd means i think some space is there which i am unable to recover i m having only 4 .5 gb but i gave 8 gb , plzz help me and tell me how can i do a proper installation of redhat ,
mymail id puneetaries@rediffmail.com
Thanks in advance

'fdisk -l' as root can be used to show the entire partition table for your system.

do the fdisk -l as listed above, plus a few questions.

1. what type of drive is it? IDE, SCSI, sATA?

2. have you tried booting with knoppix or any of the other live CDs to see if the drive data is intact?

heh, i was thinking live cd too. FWIW i really like the slax live cd becuase it's really good hardware detection, but it does a really nice job of automounting your partitions for you in "/mnt"

I tried knoppix, and it mounted one of my nfs as read write and corrupted it on me. Just my own experience but that was a while ago.

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I have SATA 80 gb drive and im having winxp right now , c,d, 2 drives are there , i shrinked my d drive by 8 gb for redhat
and i made another filesyatem by cutting of my d drive and i made this 8 gb as ext2 file syaytem but Redhat dint detect it i did this partition by PartitionMagic tool under windows , finally i deleted that partition as redhat wasnt detecting that , but problem is that i am unable to get all those 8 gb "Back" i am having only 4 gb thatis my d drive was 39 gb and i gave 8 gb for that drive and i del that drive but my d drive show now only 34.8 gb space now what shud i do to recover my space ??

and furthermore i want Redhat installed on my pc with winxp as dual boot ,plzz plzz suggest me a way i have 3cds of redhat.

Thanks a lot

Make the rescue disks available in partition magic, or boot with the partition magic CD. Then do your partitioning. Don't use partition magic less than version 8.0.

If I may just point out, I think before you jump into partition magic be sure to use in windows their 'chkdsk' utility and check the windows drive for errors.

Partition magic is very smart utility, and I used it for years, and like Awesome said use version 8.0 or above in DOS. Only use partition magic on ext2 or ext3 linux file system resize operations. Version 8 or above is great for windows partitions All I've found. Partition magic flakes out on me for reiser or xfs.

But the partition magic (and rightfully so) performs a file system check on your hard drive, and it may give you errors only at times, or may miss an error and do something bad.

Basically I've just found if Windows sits on the hard drive, just run chckdsk first in windows then use partition magic in dos like awesome said.

Also, you may want to get a western digitial or maxtor boot disk (depending on who made your hard drive) and back up your boot sector before doing any of this.

It sounds like you have just a 'free space' error, and partition magic will probably see it as partition magic first loads up, and will probably ask you if you want to fix it. But sometimes...well the worst can happen you know.