Hi,

I'm still learning all this and in need of some assistance. I have built a system with the partitions below and now been asked to create another 300GB partition.
I have used command fdisk and managed to create /dev/sda4 from /dev/sda5.

Now sure where to go from here to get this ready?


Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 65284 524289307+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 65285 78338 104856255 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 78339 163944 687630195 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 78339 163944 687630163+ 8e Linux LVM

sda4 is an extended partition---it acts as a "wrapper" for any "logical" partitions that you add. It appears that you created sda5 inside of sda4---and that you used all the space available. sda 5 is ~690 GB.

If you need 300GB, then use fdisk to delete sda5 and then create a new partition of 300GB. Beyond that, you'll need to tell us what you want to do---eg i assume you'll want to create a file system and then mount it somewhere.

Tell as much as you can about the context of all this, and we can give better help.

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/dev/sda5 is a partition containing a LVM. That means it is not clear if all the space is used, you have to use the LVM tool to have a look at it and maybe resize/create logical volumes.

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All I see is the partition type---would you not have to do something else to create a filesystem? In other words: I had thought that a partitioning tool would only make changes to the partition table---and not actually write anything to the associated disk space. Does the LVM tool require that the partition be of type "8e"?

Well, 8e is the correct LVM (actually pv) partition type, but whether you can make a different type and then pvcreate it I don't know.
I always use the recommended partition types for whatever partition types I want.
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html
You certainly do have to put an actual fs eg ext3 on top though.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/