Please help with partitioning.
 

I am new to Linux and I want to Enlarge my Linux partition and decrease my windows partition. I cant boot from windows because of a series of unfortunate events although I can access my files through Linux if this makes any difference please tell me. I am confused of how to do the partitioning.

I believe you have named two separate areas of concern:
1)The damage to your boot menu. In other words "not being able to start the microsoft windows system."

2)If all you wish to do is to increase your Linux partition file area:
You should obtain a boot CD based on this tool: Gparted,(http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) and boot from this.
--
Later, if 1)eventually you wish to correct a GRUB based boot menu Try http://supergrubdisk.org/ . I found this utility quite helpful.

Okay so I burnt the ISO to the disk. I then booted from the disk but instead of seeing two separate partitions I see one partition that was named Unallocated and it was 149.4 GB what should I do?

that is not good, it seems to be misreading your disk or your volume/parition label is damaged.

Anyone know what I should do?

Anybody?

Somebody...

Download and burn a copy of PartedMagic or GPartedLiveCD, both live partitioning CDs. Boot one of these, open GParted and look at your partitions without changing anything.

Then open a terminal(ROXTerminal in PartedMagic) and type the command "fdisk -l". This will read your partition table.

Post back with the results of "fdisk -l"

http://partedmagic.com/download.html

On this forum you cannot expect replies that are as rapid as you would hope they might.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question

Don't keep bumping your own thread!! There are at least 2 magic words here: "Please" and "Patience".

If I read you correctly, you viewed the disk with GParted and saw nothing but "unallocated". If that's true, then the partition table is corrupted or missing.

If you have anything on the disk you need to recover, then the first thing to do is get it mounted into another system. One way to do this is simply boot up from a "Live CD" version of Linux. As already mentioned, "fdisk -l" give you a dump all drives and partitions visible to the OS. If you confirm that the partitions are not visible, then do some searches on "partition recovery".

If you don't have anything you need to recover, then just proceed with partitioning using GParted.

Good Luck!!

Here are the results for the fdisk -l. Seems to sense my other partitions. Although gparted doesn't
rather odd.

Sorry doesn't come out in right format. Hope its readable.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x00000080

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 19131 19458 2619392 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

/dev/sda2 6 1280 10240000 7 HPFS/NTFS

/dev/sda3 * 1280 18317 136842918+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

/dev/sda4 18318 19458 9157691 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sda5 19131 19458 2619392 dd Unknown

/dev/sda6 18318 19089 6201058+ 83 Linux

/dev/sda7 19090 19130 329301 82 Linux swap / Solaris



Partition table entries are not in disk order

This is a mess...
2.6 G FAT32 (Active)
10.2 G NTFS
137 G NTFS (Active)
9.2 G extended, containing:
2.6 G unknown
6.2 G Linux
0.3 G Linux swap

Problems:
2 active partitions. Linux doesn't care, but Windows might
Space for Linux is marginal
Linux swap is marginal

I'm wondering how things got this way, but in the end it does not matter. I would simply start over and use this disk very differently**.

In GParted, are you sure you have the right disk selected? I can't run it at the moment, but I seem to recall a dialog to select which disk is being viewed. Regardless, what do you want to do next?

** I like to have partitions for the OSes, and then 1 or 2 big partitions for shared data. Ideally, the data is all on a separate physical drive. With one 160G drive, I would set up roughly as follows:

NTFS (Windows): ~15-20 G, first partition, marked active

Linux: 10-15 G

Linux swap: 2 G, at the end of the drive

Extended: Fill the rest of the drive
Logical partition: ~80-100 G, FAT32 or ext3* for shared data
The balance of the extended partition left emtpy (unallocated) for future additions

*FAT32 is easily accessed by both Linux and Windows, but I prefer to have all data on ext3. From Windows, this can be accessed using the ext2fsd driver.

M$ will care about the two active(s).

delete all the other partitions, including the extended one.
shrink back the 137Gb by at least 37Gb & create a extended partition in the newly vacant area.
create a /swap of 1Gb & /home in the rest of the space.
hide the 2.6 Gb as thats supposed to be the hidden backup partition, for drive C: - the 10.2Gb.
the <now> 100Gb is the D: drive.

be sure that the c: drive is the active partition
install your new linux O/S into the new /home & it should also detect the M$ O/S.

post back your results.

Thanks for the feedback, but I'm confused how to do anything with the partitions since GParted only shows the one unallocated partition. There is a dialog but when clicked on all it shows is one option which is already selected which is /dev/sda.

I'm not sure what you mean by "unallocated partition". I think it is just saying that there are no partitions---i.e unallocated space. If you are sure that GParted is looking at the right thing, then it is evidence of something being amiss in the partition table.

As I said, I would recommend starting over. Since GParted says there are no partitions, then you can probably simply create new ones from there.

If you feel like digging deeper, run this:

post the results here.

By unallocated partition what I mean is that when I open Gparted all it shows is one partition named Unallocated but anyway here are the results for dd if=/dev/sda bs=1 skip=446 count=64 | hexdump -C.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
00000000 80 00 c1 ff 0c fe ff ff 00 a0 51 12 00 f0 4f 00 |..........Q...O.|
00000010 00 19 15 05 07 fe ff ff 00 40 01 00 00 80 38 01 |.........@....8.|
00000020 80 fe ff ff 07 fe ff ff 00 c0 39 01 4d 1d 50 10 |..........9.M.P.|
00000030 00 fe ff ff 0f fe ff ff 8a 17 8a 11 76 78 17 01 |............vx..|
00000040
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
64 bytes (64 B) copied, 0.00206849 s, 30.9 kB/s

Nothing is jumping out at me.

You can find stuff on the web about how to decode this table (eg search on CHS and LBA addresses).

I would still just start over......

I'm pretty sure it is showing unallocated space---not a partition. If it were a partition, it would have a number, size, etc.

Another option---there are partition recovery tools around--I've never used them, but---as a minimum--they might give you some confirmation of what you have.