Partition on Linux hard drive (after installition)
 

Hello,
First things first, Thank you for reading this post, and any help given.

OK the problem. I have already installed Suse 9.1 pro onto a 2nd hard drive a WD 120Gb XP home is on a 60Gb hard drive. So in Yast it lookslike this.
dev/hda 57.2gb hds.............
dev/hda1 57.2gb HPFS/NTFS
dev/hdb 111.7gb WD120...........
dev/hdb1 996.1Mb Linux Swap
dev/hdb2 110.8GB Linux Native

So in the 120Gb (hdb) I would like to make a 60 gig partition. I guess that my question is, 'Do I need to worry about were the partition block starts, like you do in Win'?
Oh and one more side question 'Is there anything that I should think about before i do this and is there any forseeable troubles on the way'?
Thank you :Pengy:

Sorry one more thing if someone could explain how hdb and hdb2 can be 111.7GB and 110.8Gb respectively on a 120Gb drive, it would be great. Just for the learning curve. cheers

Right, I can't explain the partitionning (because I'm trying to do exactly the same thing myself and I can't do it lol), but I can explain the second part of the question.

In Linux, the IDE drives are named after their position on the IDE interface:

/dev/hda is the first drive on the first IDE interface
/dev/hdb is the second drive on the first IDE interface
/dev/hdc is the first drive on the second IDE interface
/dev/hdd is the second drive on the second IDE interface.

So when you talk about /dev/hdb you are talking about the whole hard disk, being 111.7GB in size (hard disks are rarely, if ever, exactly the same size as they say on the box of the hard disk). But when you talk about /dev/hdb2 you are talking about a partition on the disk.

SUSE doesn't really explain any of this in the automatic installation, you have to do expert partitioning to learn.

Hope this is what you were after

Yes where they start matters....

Darn, so it does matter. Makes life so much more difficult. Linux doesn't have a "defrag" like program does it? Also Big thank you to 'scuffell'. Makes sense.
Oh sorry to do multiple questions on one tread but is there any way of seeing the harddrive, such that you can see where the data is on the hard drive?
Cheers :Pengy:

check the man pages for <df> and <fdisk>

df -i may be what you are asking for...

or

fdisk -l