Ideas on using available space
 

I have successfully installed a dual boot (after a week of installs and reinstalls). I have a
1. win 98 with 4gb (fat32) primary
2. and a mandrake linux with 4 gb (ext2).

Booting with lilo, and have about 52gb of free unused space.

Now I want to partition another 30gb with fat32, another 1 gb as swap and the rest as ext2. I am not able to create an extended partition using cfdisk. What do I do?

Can anyone suggest what I should do and how I should proceed from here to use all my hard disk space?

Thanks in advance

I've got an idea....
I have a 15 gig hard drive, why don't you get rid of that extra disk space burning a hole in your chipset and trade me?

Thanks for your smart reply Adam ... the solution to my problem is to create an extended partition to have 3 more partitions. However cfdisk would not let me create an extended partition. Anyone know why? Thanks

Don't go with ext2 on large partitions, fsck will keep you reading some news in a local paper rather than online. Use journaling filesystem (ext3, ReiserFS - very good on small files (<1K of size files), JFS, or XFS). Just my 2 cents. And if you want to make use of that left over space, you can host an ftp server serving ... , ah dah, I forgot ... Oh well, you got an idea, just use your system smart.

yeah, sorry for the smart-ass-ness, i didn't mean it seriously. You can mount the extra partitions on one of the directories of your filesystem if you want, like on /home or /usr/src/ or something. You would want to edit /etc/fstab to make this mount on bootup

I have only 20GB, and have 8 operating systems cramped. Why
don't you give me some 50GB? May be that can help install some
more :).

thats another idea cmsenthil.. you could just try out a bunch of different distributions of linux, and find the one you like.

MP3's MP3's MP3's source, more MP3's MP3's MP3's
Hell i never seem to have enough space. Just killed my Win2k partition, reformated as ReiserFS and added it under my Linux root as MP3 partition. Now i finally have space to install more programs. See thats great, most of Linux software is free so you can download and try out a bunch of programs, hell try as many as you want, and then when you have made a list of programs you know you need and will use, make a clean Linux install, and install only the programs you need. This way you have a efficient, customized system, with only the programs you actually need..
but really, is it that hard to find a way to use your free space?
And hard disks are so damn expensive for my wallet....
-NSKL