hey all! i'm having trouble creating new paritition with my redhat 9

here is the printout of the fdisk

# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 4327 MB, 4327464960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 526 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 461 3598560 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 462 526 522112+ 82 Linux swap

I want to create another partition. when i do fdisk on /dev/hda, it says i dont have any free sectors, which is fair enough. then i tried to do fdisk /dev/hda2 to see if i can make up a new partition from there. im not sure whether u r allowed to do that, as to me it looks like im tryin to resize?

anyhow, since this paritition is online, linux asked to be reboot to make the new partition active. before reboot, i printed the partition table and it showed the below

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda2p1 1 13 104391 83 Linux


after reboot, i thaught i need to created a file system on the partition. when i executed mke2fs /dev/hda2p1, it said device doesnt exist!

what am i doing wrong here? pls excuse my ignorance, im new to all this stuff. TIA

Ok, the entire physical drive in your machine is labeled as hda, hdb, hdc, or whatever. When you see hda1, hda2, or hda3 for example, those refer to partitions within the same hard drive.

When you tried to create a partition on /dev/hda and it said you had no more sectors, that meant all of the space on that hard drive was used. Changing to /dev/hda2 won't change that, because it's still part of the same hard drive. In fact, I'm not sure why fdisk even allowed you to do that. You would be trying to create a partition within a partition, and to my knowledge, that's not possible.

You will need to either:
1. Install a new hard drive and create one or more partitions on it
2. Resize your current partitions to make room for another one. Be aware that resizing typically means you will lose all data on partitions you change. There are tools that say they can resize a partition without data loss, but I've heard mixed reviews about all of them.

dark helment, thanks for the quick reply.

i was thinking the same aswell and just wanted someone to confirm that for me. thanks for ur tip
i will look in to the tools that will help me to resize.

dark helmet, could u pls suggest me some tools that u think had the most success in resizing and at the same time not too complicated to use
thanks champ!

I don't use them actually. I have heard "Partition Magic" mentioned a number of times, but it's a commercial tool.

Whenever I need to change my partition scheme, I simply make a backup copy. I use tar to store the partition's contents into a single file, burn it to a cd, change the partition, use a "rescue" CD (like Knoppix), and then extract the tarball(s) to the new partitions. I'd only try this is you're comfortable with your rescue system, and you're confident you won't forget anything important. Essentially it's the backup-reformat-restore routine.