hello ppl,

I am a total novice @ linux...I installed open suse 10.1 on my laptop which already had windows vista in it.with 250 gb and four partitions effectively.while installing i just accepted whatever the installing procedures gave,as in I didn't alter any setting.It resulted in my harddrive getting partitioned further.


in linux system there are 6 partitions,whereas in windows there is only 3.


now the problem is,in windows the three partitions indicate only 110 gb .i want to utilize 250 gb...how to retrieve back the unused 140.....which seemed to be lost due to the additional partitioning effected by linux

You would need to boot your system of a LINUX live CD so that you could use the gparted tool to delete your LINUX partitions. When you rebooted into Windows this would then register as free space, which you would be able to add to one of your existing Windows partitions (but not the one you booted off) using the Windows disk management tool.

It's pretty hard to know what exactly you did from your post. You have a 250GB drive with four partitions, four partitions with windows before you installed whatever version of Linux you installed? If you had four windows partitions, were any of them logical partitions? If you had windows on the computer, you would obviously have to create additional partitions to put Linux on.

Linux will see your windows partitions and windows won't see your Linux partitions which is why you see 6 partitions from Linux and only three from windows and also accounts for the discrepancey in size.

Did you actually get whatever version of Linux you wanted installed?

You could try

fdisk -l

to see what's really there