Combining partitions on one Harddisk
 

i have reinstalled Linux 2006 free on my 14 Gig hd. It now has what appear to be six partitions, up from the three i think it had the first time.

Using DiskDrake i see it has hda1,:/, swap (hda8), /home (hda9), swap (hda6), and 7Gig of what appears to be empty space called hda7.

i have a couple of questions. Might hda7 still have my old /home on it? If so, what might be the command to see it or how can i access it from Konqueror in order to transfer at least some things to my "new" /home on hda9?

If it is empty, how can i transfer its space to the other partitions?

Thanks a lot for whatever help you can give. Have a great afternoon! :)

cfdisk /dev/hda will show you the layout and what filesystem is on which partition.
...run as root and do not change anything - quit with "q"...
you can then mount each partition manually (in case mounting via the gui does not work somehow)

for instance:
make a directory as a mount-point for each partition you want to mount
:
mkdir /mnt/hda1
.
.
.
mkdir /mnt/hda9

then mount the partitions to the directory you made:
mount -t filesystem-type /dev/hdaX /mnt/hdaX
filesystem-type being what cfdisk told you

Perhaps the best way of getting out of the hole is to delete all the partitions, re-create only a swap say 0.5Gb large plus about one 8Gb partition and tell the installer to use it for "/". My installed Mandriva 2006 is only 4.8Gb large.

I always install one distro per partition to avoid the type of problem you are having. Unless you run Mandriva as a server and want optimum performance in each partition you will be far better off to have a single partition so that /boot, /usr, /root, /home.... etc as subdirectories inside one partition.

Thanks guys!

My cfdisk /dev/hda shows me essentially the same list as DiskDruid. How would i "mount", for example, hda9, which is a ext3 file system, through my gui?

Have a great evening! :)

only works if hda9 has a filing system. If it is unformatted nothing can be mounted.

mount -t filesystem-type /dev/hdaX /mnt/hdaX as I already said:
in this case this would translate to:
this has to be done as root
- to have it available via gui it'll probably need to be in /etc/fstab.
A line like this should do it:
/dev/hda9 /mnt/hda9 ext3 noauto,noatime,users,rw 0 0

Jomen instruction has better details.

I omitted the file type because most modern Linux seem to be able to detect the common filing systems used both in Linux, Dos and Windows. The file type is only asked if there is something not quite right with the partition.

Great! Finally got something from this great Forum which actually worked! Thanks a lot guys! Now i can see it in Kong and should be able to move most of the stuff to the new /home. Now all i need to do is to figure out how to, after moving everything out, incorporate this disk space into the other partitions.

Have a great afternoon! :)