Holy christmas batman! where'd my unformatted hd space go?
 

When I originally installed linux I had plans to eventually put XP on another partition (which I no longer am doing) so I left about 3 gigs of space unformatted. When I run fdisk I get the following which seems to omit my free space. My question is how do I find my free space so I can format and mount it? Is /dev/shm my free space that i'm looking for?

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdc2 2016044 1877124 36508 99% /
/dev/hdc1 101089 9171 86699 10% /boot
none 192236 0 192236 0% /dev/shm
/dev/cdrom 405618 405618 0 100% /mnt/cdrom

Holy whips and chains batman!...

er.. anyway

It appears your free space would be that /dev/shm as it says 0 used 0%? Did you try fdisk /dev/hda or fdisk /dev/hdc to select a drive?

Ok I tried the following command to no avail:
[brandon@localhost brandon]$ /sbin/fdisk /dev/hda

Unable to open /dev/hda
[brandon@localhost brandon]$ /sbin/fdisk /dev/hdc

Unable to open /dev/hdc


What am I missing?

Dunno. When I type. "fdisk" it shows me a list of disks and askes me to type it agian as fdisk /dev/??? to select my disk...

The df command only shows information about mounted filesystems.

You need to be logged in as root to use fdisk.

/dev/shm is shared memory.
http://fscked.org/writings/SHM/shm.html

While logged in as root, executing /sbin/fdisk, I get the following output:
[root@localhost brandon]# /sbin/fdisk /dev/hda

Unable to read /dev/hda

What am I doing wrong here? I just want my precious hard drive space back ;)

try:

su -
(password)
fdisk -l

Ok, now I know the free space is located on /dev/hdc4 which has already been formatted for fat16 but when I try to delete the table as shown in the following text, I don't get the desired result.

Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 4
Warning: partition 4 has empty type

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot.
Syncing disks.

Hrm :( Don't suppose you have an old dos boot disk laying around? If you can find/get one, google for "aefdisk" program, it'll do wonders at re-doing partition tables ;) It should fit on any old dos boot floppy too.

Post the output of fdisk. If partition 4 has an empty type I'm wondering whats going on.

Boot the RH install CD and select rescue mode then you should be able to modify hdc