Help, where is the rest of my hard drive?
 

Here I was last night trying to install Mandrake 8.0 on my extra hard drive of 30gigs. The drive is only used for storage and everthing is backed up. Well anyway, I followed instructions when it came to the hard drive partition, etc. I selected the drive (which is already formatted for Windows) and hit the resize button. I put a figure of 15gigs in the next dialog box. Well after about half an hour it finally showed me the "white area" where I could select that portion and "auto-allocate" for a linux parition. But I noticed that the "white" portion was 19gigs (which is what was left on the drive anway). I didn't want the rest of the drive to be taken for linux... so I hit the undo button and the whole drive once again showed blue and I exited the install. But now here is the fun part. When I go back to Windows and click on the D: drive it only shows it to be a 8.6gig drive instead of 30. Where is the rest of the space? Even in Norton Utilities it shows it to be only 8.6. Can someone please help me. My last resort would be to format this drive... lots of games on there!!! Maybe I missed something in Mandrake. Can I go back in and start over?

Thx, Tim

Could you use fdisk (Win and Linux versions) to see the partitions?

fdisk
 

Thanks for replying... yes I did look in fdisk... but it showed first of all my normal operating disk (C: drive) and then I changed it and found the D: drive. It showed it to be 27.96 gigs. No other paritions... so I have both windows and norton utilities showing it to be only 8.6gigs and fdisk showing it to be 28gigs. Very strange... anyone else want to give this a try?

Could you descibe it in more details. I do not fully understand...

Sorry, wrong info.

OK, boys and girls... What I am trying to figure out is whether or not I still have a 30gig hard drive or not. Windows tells me (after the failed parition using Mandy's diskdrake) that I only have 8.6gigs. I am trying to find out what happened to the other 19.3 gigs I did have as free space before the attempt... Though fdisk shows I have it... do I really... Windows says I do not. I want to know what Mandrake did to my hard drive... I still want to install Mandrake 8.0... because that is the newest version I have. I want to try Linux really bad. Thanks again

I had a similar problem and was able to re-install Mandrake. What I don't know is how to increase the size of your Windows partition without re-formatting the whole hard drive. I hope somebody else knows the answer so we can both learn something. I'm still trying to figure this out myself.

thanks mystie
 

Yes, I hear ya... But I haven't even got a chance to install Mandrake yet... so maybe I need to try again... pretty scard though!!

Can you do DIR listings of the drive from Windows? If you can, do all your files seem to be present?

The 8.6 GB point is one of those "magic numbers" for the PC BIOS and its drive routines. That's the largest drive that ordinary BIOS routines can recognize, so anything larger gets reported as that size if you have an older BIOS. There are BIOS settings for making bigger drives usable; it sounds as if the "undo" operation put the old partition table back but failed to set the rest of the information up properly. It's possible that the partition got tagged as "FAT" rather than "VFAT" -- and the VFAT type is what 32-bit Windows used to enable access past the 8.6-GB point!

Making any sort of changes to the partition table with the Microsoft FDISK program will require that you reformat the drive and restore the files from backups. You can use something like Partition Magic, or the Linux FDISK utility, to make minor changes without damaging the data though... There are also some freeware Windows programs for making such changes, but I can't vouch for their reliability!

oh my goodness
 

Hey Jim,
Thanks... I now understand the 8gig limitation of an old BIOS. I have a Pentium II 300mhz... about 4 yrs old. I started the installation again and got to the partition part and Mandrake says that I have a 27gig hd on /hdc just to see what it would say compared to Windows. Mandrake shows it to be a complete FAT32 Windows/DOS partition... it shows all "blue".

So I guess my choices aren't very good... format, format, format. I won't do it though until I know exactly my other choices.

Thanks for your help...

The only problem with Partition Magic is that it's shareware and costs $70.00. You can download a demo version but it's limited in what it does. I tried a lot of the freeware and didn't find one worth using. Also I'm running Mandrake 8.1 and it doesn't recognize the fdisk command (don't ask me why, if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them.). Like I said, I ran into a similar problem and I tried EVERYTHING. It was a really frustrating I finally just let Mandrake partition my drive for me. But I'm a newbie to Linux so I probably missed something.

But Jim, since you're so knowledgable, is there anyway to increase the size of the Linux partitions without wiping everything out? I made my Windows partition smaller recently, I plan on getting rid of it completely as soon as I can, but I just reinstalled Mandrake. Any suggestions for when I decide to get rid of Windows? I know I can add another Linux partition but I'm not sure how that works in relation to the other two Linux partitions and swap file that I already have. This is probably a stupid question but like I said, I'm still trying to figure all this out. Thanks!

My knowledge is much better at the hardware level than it is with Linux. I found out about the 8-GB barrier several years ago while researching a book (never completed) about PC Peripherals. I've only been working seriously with Linux since last November so I'm still in very early stages of learning the ins and outs of the utilities.

I believe that you can create a new partition, using the diskdrake utility of Mandy, and then create a filesystem on it and temporarily mount that filesystem at a dummy mountpoint such as /new (mkdir /new, then mount /dev/hdb9 /new if your new partition is partition 9 on hdb). At that point you could copy any existing directory to that new partition, then edit your fstab file to mount the partition under the new name and reboot. Once you know that all is well you can rm -fR the dummy mountpoint. Keep in mind that this is guesswork, from remembering something I read in a book earlier today, and I've not yet done it although I do have an unpartitioned 10 GB on the same drive where my Mandy 8.1 system lives...

When I decided to explore Linux seriously, I picked up a new 20-GB drive (only cost $80 and they're less expensive today), and used it so as not to disturb the existing Win95 system on that box. Through a series of user errors, I managed to get the Win95 drive infected with a virus, so in the process of cleaning things up I simply wiped out all the Win95 system there and now use the original Win drive (also 20 GB) as storage space under Linux! It's still set up as VFAT though; as soon as I manage to get things cleared up enough I'll re-format it in ext3...