Hi all
I installed puppy on my old dell machine about a year ago. I did not use it a lot and the only personal data on it is about 10 songs. a couple of PDF puppy tutorials and 5 documents.

This was my 1st attempt at using and installing Linux. I think perhaps I did not make swap or home partitions and I know I did not create a user name or password. (only I have access to my pc's)

Anyway today I was trying to download ubuntu 13.4 to disk when I received this message. Personal data almost full either delete some data or resize.

Using gparted I took 20Gb of unallocated space and formatted as ext2 hoping puppy would use that but the same thing is still. happening. Puppy is the only OS on this machine.

Sorry I really struggle to get my head around this partition thing. Managed 3 times to wipe out windows when tying to install mint with xp, ubuntu with win 7 and mageia with xp. This must be a record lol but I just keep trying.

Its a desktop PC 2.6 hyperthreaded 2Gb ram & 160 Hdd

Think I should have mounted, flagged or used existing space on sda1??????

Here is how the disk looks now:

unallocated 145MiB
dev/sda1 ext2 50.98GiB initrd/mnt/dev_savepuppy used 2.36 unused 48.61GiB

dev/sda2 extended 19.78 GiB

unallocated 78.15

Please help thanks

Did you add the new partition to /etc/fstab file so it will mount during the boot process? Did you use the mount command to mount the new partition? If not, to either, then the space can not be used.

Once you have the new partition mounted, you should be able to direct the downloading to the new space. I would suggest making a directory for the downloading; such as download, or what ever you want to call it.

Think of a partition as a separate hard drive. In linux, it has to be mounted to the file system, or it remains just as an unusable space. Partitions can be an entire drive, or a part of a drive.

To get a better view of your mounted partitions, in a command prompt, run the command 'df' ( without quotes ). You will get some output like this:

This is from my system. I have two hard drives, right now I'm running from my second drive, sdb. I have a partitioned sda drive also. You will notice none of the 'a' partitions show up. That is because they are not mounted to the current file system.

So, to mount one, I can run the command as root, mount. Here is an example.

I run the mount command, then the df command. I now have sda1 mounted in the file system at /mnt/sda1.

Hope this helps.

[QUOTE=camorri;4972405]Did you add the new partition to /etc/fstab file so it will mount during the boot process? Did you use the mount command to mount the new partition? If not, to either, then the space can not be used.

Thanks Cliff I will have a go at this but im really not sure how to do it or how to mount a download directory on the partition. Where do I find the options for adding /etc/fstab

Also please could you explain what when wrong. I had allocated 50GB partition to puppy, it had only used 2.36 so why was there a problem. Really need to start getting my head around this. I have read numerous tutorials but when I try to adopt them there is always something not quite the same on my system so I start questioning if I got it right or not and of course after a certain point you cant go back.

Ubuntu d/l with only one minute left to go. aghhhh

also I need to stop my pc from powering off after 5 minutes inactivity. Can you help please.

I posted this problem twice. sorry. I looked and looked for the first post and also checked via search but I couldnt find it. sorry.

Keeptrying has become my middle name. lol Thanks again regards margaret

Happy to help, where I can.

Let me see if I can give you the steps to add a partition.

The first step, I think you have done, and that is to run a partitioning tool to create a partition on un-allocated space on the drive.

Next you would format that new partition with the file system you want. Linux supports many different file systems. Since you are using, or are going to use Ubuntu, select ext4 file system. That is the default in Ubuntu, and many other distros. The command would look like this:
This command as root, would format the partition sda5. You do need to be careful with this command. You need to be sure what partition ( like sda5 ) you are going to format. Once you format it, any data is gone.

Once the file system is created, you need to create a mount point. A mount point is just an empty directory. There are usually some already created on most systems. /mnt and /media are just two. You can use them, however, I suggest you do not use /media. It is there for 'automounting' some devices, like flash drives.

The mount point is really your choice, and a lot depends how the data on that partition will be used, and what users will use it. I have a multi-user system and use /mnt. So, assuming you do the same, ( you don't have to ) you could put the new partition there. Here are the commands.

1. 'cd /mnt' ( commands as root, no quotes ).
2. 'mkdir sda5' ( sda5 us just a name, you can call the mount point anything you want ).

Time to mount the formatted the partition.

3. 'mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/sda5' ( press enter, if this works you get no output from the system ). No news is good news.

To help you understand the command, /dev/sda5 is the name the system knows the partition by. This may be different on your system; at least the sda5 may be different. It depends on the partitioning on the drive. If you want to 'see' all the partitions on a drive, you can get a view of them by going to the /dev directory, and do a 'ls sda*' for the first drive, and 'ls sdb*'.

The /mnt/sda5 is the name of the mount point. So, summary, mount - the command, /dev/sdax is the partition the system knows, and /mnt/sdax is the mount point. Thats it.

I can not say for sure. You have not provided enough information for me to say. From reading your post, I suspect you have not had much experience with partitioning, formatting, and adding more disk space.

Once the space is formatted and mounted, you probably need to add at least one directory, somewhere to put files. I suggested the dir name of 'download' since you were having problems downloading a large file. 'download' is only a name, you can call it anything that makes sense to you. When you start the download, point your browser to that new directory. The file should go there. If you added 50 gig partition, you should have 50 gigs of space to put files on. In firefox, you can set the place to save files by going to Edit-->Preferences-->General-->Save files to.

This sounds like a BIOS setting. Do you know how to change, or at least view the BIOS settings? If not, post the make/model of the system. Its usually a hot key you press, before booting begins.