Partition Magic 8.0 and ext3 probs
 

Hi there. I've got an ext 3 filesystem which I tried to resize (make bigger) with partition magic. I seems that I was partially successful. the ntfs partition is now smaller and the freebsd parition is also the right size (but had to delete it and remake it). In fact the linux partition even seems to be the right size. Or so it seems when viewed with fdisk. However, df will only detect the old (smaller) size and hence I run out of room in the same manner if I hadn't resized.

Output of fdisk:

Disk /dev/hda: 41.1 GB, 41174138880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5005 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1059 8506386 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 1060 1091 257040 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda3 1092 1601 4096575 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda4 1602 5005 27342630 7 HPFS/NTFS


Output of df:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 5344528 2458884 2614148 49% /
/dev/hda4 27342628 17394192 9948436 64% /win
/dev/hdb1 3130732 1223176 1907556 40% /winback

I've run fsck and it didn't fix the problem so I don't know what to do now.

Windows doesn't like to be in the extended partition, so re-do the partitions so that Windows is on the primary partition. Linux can be anywhere on the hard drive. When you use Partition Magic, make a primary partition for Windows and an extended partition for LINUX. Don't format the extended partition using Partition Magic. After Partition Magic has finish, test if you can boot into Windows. If it works, make a boot disk for Windows and reboot the computer. Then run freebsd installation. Now you can make partitions for LINUX and format them. Partition Magic has its own way of formatting partitions, so its best to leave Linux filesystems to the native Linux utilities. Its ok for Partition Magic to format FAT32 and NTFS but not LINUX filesystems.

For the space, install only the packages that you want. 8 gigabytes is well over enough for /. My / is about 3 gigabytes, but /home (9 gigabytes) and /boot (16 megabytes) is not included. Those are on seperate partitions.

You could use parted to resize LINUX partitions.

BTW, try using df -h next time.

By primary I take it you mean the first. All four you see there are primaries. Secondly, I actually DID resize my linux partition and fdisk can see this. However, no other program in linux seems to see this (notice the disparity between the outputs of fdisk and df).

Two guesses:
1. You (or partition magic) did not make the filesystem on the newly acquired free space, and so it is still free space in linux's view.
2. Linux still only sees the original partition as being mounted, even though you have changed the partition table. (I know that sounds nuts, but a lot of the time the simplest answers solve the problem)
good luck

Hmmm... When I go into fdisk and do nothing except write the partition table then it says it has changed (and will be updated at next reboot) but still stays the same. So that could be the problem. I just don't know how to fix that. Any suggestions?