I am going to partition a hard drive with Rh 9 on it, but when I log in as root and type fdisk /dev/hda the fdisk device pops up and says that it cannot find /dev/hda. what should I do?

try fdisk -l. This will give you a list of all drives and the partitions.

If you have SCSI drives, it is /dev/sda.

Is your driver Primary Master? If it is, first make sure your BIOS is recognizing this drive as such. You need BIOS recognition first, then linux will follow. If this drive is NOT Master Primary, then you will need to specify a different device than /dev/hda



Cool

thatnks letme try

How do I tell if it is Primary Master? cuz it still wont reconize it

ok how do I set it to Primary Master? or can I just plug the hd into a different ide slot?

Make sure that the IDE cable is plugged into the "Primary" IDE connector on the motherboard, and the jumpers on the back of the drive are set to "Master". There should be a little diagram there for you to make things easier. I like to plug the Master device onto the far end of the IDE cable too, although I don't know that this makes any difference. There you go, then that should be /dev/hda.

Unless you have a scsi drive of course.

For me, I just put the jumpers in the places indicated on the drive. As far as various autodetections and whatnot, I don't know. Hook it up to the first connector of the first channel and set the jumpers to primary master. Put the second on the end connector of the first channel and jumper to primary slave. (iirc)

And I don't recall correctly - beat me to it and were correct. Master on the end. And it does make a difference - at least, it didn't work til I switched it.

Sorry about that.

I got the hd set to Primary Master and got fdisk to work but when i had it print the partition table it said:
Disk /dev/hda: 30.7 GB, 30750031872 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 59582 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 203 102280+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 204 57502 28878696 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 57503 59582 1048320 82 Linux swap

and I haven partitioned it yet. I have RH 9 and i was partitioning the hd to put slack on it how much space do I have left and y did RH have 2 linux partitions?(not including swap)

/dev/hda1 appears to be the boot partition 100M
/dev/hda2 is the / (root) partition, with almost 28G
/dev/hda3 is, but obviously, swap with 1G

So, you don't have any slack for Slackware.

can I sub divide the /dev/hda2?

Actually YES, but extremely dangerous

The idea is, if you dare, to delete /dev/hda2 and recreate a smaller partition of, say 15G, if you so desire.

But a wrong step and you may end up with a non-bootable system with no data.

----- DISCLAIMER -----------------
Don't hold me liable if you lose data this way, thank yourself if you are successful. YOU ARE WARNED!!!!!

I recommend you don't attempt the repartitioning. Try the re-install way ....

or give parted a run for it's money. Parted can be downloaded at:
http://freshmeat.net/redir/gnuparted...omepage/parted

That is a less risky way, but anytime you resize a partition you are taking a risk. Backup any essential data (if any) and be ready for the worst.

Cool

how hard would it be to put a nother hd in w/ slack on it? cod I still change somthin so that I have a choide of which one boots up?


If i mess up when partitioning the hd(if I partition) how can I still use the hd if it is not booting?

I stuck another drive in mine and put Slack on it. Installed LILO and have the option to boot either system. Simple as installing the hardware and installing the software. I've also used parted on a couple other boxes and it worked great. I've said before: I trust fdisk, parted, LILO - they've not let me down so far.

You need a boot disk for any system on your computer for recovery purposes. Basically, you can never have too many boot disks. *g* You can do default disks or you can just make them bootable and then put the utilities on them you think you might need and so on.

Basically, no computer operation like that is safe and guaranteed but it's also not like it's incredibly risky - you *may* wreck your machine but your *likely* to be okay.

What is on your drive(s) anyway, though? I've only used parted on FAT systems and various Linux fs because it doesn't work with ntfs - that's why I got a second drive when I was dealing with a single partition NTFS drive (no Partition Magic for me - why pay 70 bucks for closed source software to cut a hard drive in half when I can pay 30 bucks to double the hard drive with real hardware?)