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