Folks,

I have 140 GB harddisk with three partitions(/data0 70 GB, / 10 GB, Swap 8 GB) on Redhat Linux ES 3 machine.

I didn't partition the remaining 52 GB space and how could I find the remaining space in Linux and use it for my applications?

Thanks

Robot

use 'cat /proc/filesystems' to check the layout of your harddrive.
In order to use the available space you will have to format it. Use mke2fs (for an ext2 file system), mke3fs (for a journalling ext3 filesystem) or mkreiserfs (for the reiserfs file system) to create a usable partition. You can also use more obscure filesystems but these few are most common in linux-world.
after formatting the drive you can mount it to any place you like.

How to partitioning is very subjective, but here is my suggestion:

That depends on whether you want to create more partitions (i.e. one for /usr and /opt) or just want to increase the size of /. Generally you don't want to create partitions bigger than a certain size to speed ratio for reliability and maintenance reasons. If all your software comes prepackaged, I would suggest
creating a new partition for /usr (~10Gb). If you're not a fan of package managers and install packages from source, then maybe you should have 1Gb for /usr and 10Gb for /opt (or whereever you install custom built packages). Also you would want to create a partition for home which should get the lions share of space (consider shrinking /data0).


The easiest to use free partition manager that I know of is bootit (www.terabyteunlimited.com).
To use it, download it and create a boot disk from it and boot from it. At the intro screen, press escape or hit cancel and then go to the partition work dialog. The rest should be self explanatory.

8 Gb for swap? Are you cray? Even 512Mb is almost more than you'll ever need, not to mention that Linux 2.6 doesn't support swap partitions larger than 2Gb as far as I remember. Linux's swapping behavior is different from Windows. Windows tries to swap more so that there is more memory available (probably because it has inefficient memory management) while Linux needs much less swap space since its swap behavior is a lot more conservative.

Before you can use the 52G of space you will need to partition it and format it. You can log into root, run cfdisk, partition the space, and then format the space using whichever file system you prefer. Please see the man pages for cfdisk for more info, but it's a pretty simple tool to use. As already noted, partitioning is a highly subjective topic, and everyone has their own ideas as to which is "best". There is no right or wrong answer.

I'll have to agree that an 8G (!!!) swap space is just flat out WAY too much. Unless you are running on only 64Mg of RAM or less, a 256Mg swap (give or take) should be plenty. Otherwise you're just wasting disk space. Good luck with it -- J.W.