Hi all,

I am having trouble with partitioning one of my hard drves.

Windows and Suse 10.2 are installed on the first drive (150Gig) and both boot fine. There is also an extra windows partition in this (drive E apparntly, and that works fine).

However I have a second hard drive at 200Gig, and I want this to be allocated entirely to suse, but have no idea as to how to make Suse even recognise it, let alone partition it.

I went to the YAST partition thing, but it said only to use if you are an expert, and I certainly aint!

Basically, I just want to save and access files to this 2nd drive (even without partitioning it to segments) with Suse alone. I'm not bothered if windows can see it.

Thanks,

Matt.

Piece o'cake....

If you are careful, you are not going to get in big trouble partitioning that drive. You can use tools such as GParted**, or QTParted** (one of these might be on your system already), but it is just as easy to use fdisk 0r cfdisk.

Your drives in Linux are identified as /dev/hda and /dev/hdb (or maybe sda and sdb, if you have SCSI or SATA). Just be sure that you don't do anything to the 1st drive (hda) where your systems are installed.

In a terminal, first type "su" to become root, then "cfdisk" or "fdisk -l"
You should see your existing partitions on the first drive, and whatever is currently on the 2nd drive. cfdisk gives a menu of what you can do next, while fdisk is not quite as friendly.

If the 2nd disk already has any partitions, the first step will be to remove them. Then create your new Linux partition.

The next step is to create a filesystem on the partition. You will likely want to use the same system as on SUSE. To create the filesystem, you use mkfs (look at man mkfs for the details)

Let us know if you are with us so far, and we can fill in whatever you need......

**GParted comes on a stand-alone bootable CD and is a handy thing to have. QTParted in on various live CD distros--eg Knoppix

Hi pixellany,

Thanks for your reply.

I forgot to tell you that I am completely new to this - an MS user wanting to leave it for good!!!

I know a few terminal commands but not enough perhaps for this kind of thing (selecting partitions and how to access them thru point and click afterwards etc).

I know the drives works... in NTFS its fine thru windows but I need it to be formatted and work entirely thru SUSE.

Any further help? Step by step if possible :-)

Thanks,

Matt.

This is what I see on my screen:

The first picture is when I use Yast, and the second is when I do what you have said using terminal commands...

www.youconclude.com/part.jpg

www.youconclude.com/terminal.jpg

I hope these pictures load up fine, they are from a netfirms server my friend is using.

As you can see, the 200Gig drive is recognised in the first pic, but not on the 2nd.

Confused !!! ??? !!!

matt

Well, I just learned something!!! cfdisk defaults to showing just one drive. Try cfdisk /dev/sdb or just fdisk -l

From the expert partitioner, we see that disk 2 already has a linux partition (sdb5) which fills the entire drive. You can try mounting this:

cd /mnt
mkdir sdb5
mount /dev/sdb5 sdb5

if this does not work, then you may need to make a filesystem first:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb5

then try again to mount the partition

Once we establish everything is working, I would go back to one of the tools, delete the existing partitions, and then create ONE primary partition (not logical) which fills maybe 1/2 the disk. Leave the rest as unpartitioned space for future expansion.

Right,

Thanks again for the relpy,

I sent you an email too but I'm not 100% how these forums work so maybe you never received it.

Everything on your last post works fine, or, should I say it appears to, until it says Mount Point is wrong.

I think, however, that is my own fault, because between the other posts I have spent so much time playing about with it I kinda reckon I have ruined it althogether lol. So maybe complete format of the week number 44 is required!

Maybe it is for the best as I think my primary drive needs re-organising anyway, and I believe it's impossible to re-install Windows as a 2nd OP ?

Please stay in touch, I'll be back as soon have got this up and running again (midday tomorrow) and the 2nd drive scrubbed to zero. :-)


matt

Your second screenshot doesn't show both drives because in fdisk you have to select each one separately first. If you went back a step and selected sdb, it would show that drive's details.

If you are going to all the trouble of re-partitioning everything, why not put Win on sda and have Suse just on sdb?

Let the Suse installer do the partitioning and keep it simple.

Windoze has to be installed first because it won't recognise your other operating system and you won't be able to dual-boot, at least not without a lot of mucking around.

If you've just installed a new hard drive after Suse was installed, you would have to do mkdir and edit the file /etc/fstab to include the new drive. This would probably have been the easiest solution from the beginning.