In the last couple of days I've been playing around with an old HDD trying to partition it for a dual boot system and I've come to the conclusin that partitioning isn't quite as straight forward as it looks.

For starters the disk has an ntfs partition which I neede to resize and I ran into innumerable obstacles to get that done. But the real trouble started when I tried to make a few linux partitions (swap, ext3).I tried using qtparted from a knoppix live cd. I could make the partitions, but once they were created and the new àrtition tabel written I couldn't alter them in any way (resize, change format or even erase). So I tried fdisk and to my surprise found there were empty spaces between partitions. So I erased the partitions and tried to make a few new ones. Then I remembered I also had cfdisk and checked the partition table there... cfdisk was unable to read it and consequently wouldn't open...

If I make a partition tabel with any appropriate tool (fdisk, cfdisk, parted, qtparted), shouldn't all the others be able to read it?

Then I had trouble writing to the newly created partitions. I can mount them, but not write to them (copy a file from another partition). First I thought it might be because I had set the filesystem type, but not really formatted, so I went into qtparted and used the format option, but still no result. In knoppix, with the partition mounted as root, I get get an error, warning I can't write to the partition.

What did I miss? Do I need to use an external format tool to create a filesystem? Is there a better partition tool available? Are the errors 'normal' or is there a logical explanation for them?

I've tried the man pages, but that didn't get me any further. I've checked out the wiki... more of the same. Where can I find some answers to my questions?

Since you have a HD with NTFS, it is not many distributions that can resize that type of filesystem. Off the top of my head, newer versions of Mandrake and SuSE installer can do that. Perhaps you could use them to create proper partition before installing your distro of choice? Just a thought.

Good luck!

thanks. The resizing went fine and I believ I did it with WinXP's DiskPart. It's the rest that's giving me headaches

How does your disk/partitions looks like? I mean, I'm assuming that you know you can have up to 4 primary partitions only? I'm not quite sure either if Linux needs to be in a primary or not to install/boot (some OS'es does though)

yeah, of course 4 primary max and then logical partitions in an extended (which takes one primary. Basicall I was trying to set up :
hda1 fat
hda2 extended
hda5 ext2 or ext3 (for /boot. location of /boot is not an issue)
hda6 ext3 (for /)
hda7 ext3 (for /home)

The trouble is that I get blank spaces between the logical partitions (e.g. if I creat them with fdiska nd then look it with cfdisk) or am simply unable to read the partition table with cfdisk after making them with qtparted. Things went a bit better when I tried using rescuecd instaed of knoppix.

Also I get errors in the numbering of partitions. I created an extended partition which showed up as hda3 even though hda2 didn't exist and when I deleted hda5 and created it again (to compensate the gaps, but without touching hda6 or hda7) it then showed up as hda8 even though it was physically before hda6. However when I used the format option in qtparted it suddenly shoed as hda5 again in cfdisk.

I'm beginning to think there are errors in my knoppix cd (checksums were fine) because it has a lot of trouble mounting and reading filesystems that I can access easily with rescuecd and even when the command line does't give me any problems konqueror hangs easily (not just 'busy' , error message saying it quit). Even so, it's not only a knoppix thing.

When I use ms-dos fdisk to create a partition it informs me I need to format it before I can use it. In linux fdisk I can choose the file type, but I don't think that really counts a fomatting, right? If I don't want to use qtparted (or can't because sometimes it simply won't allow me to do anyting with an existing partition) what tools can I use to 'format' - create a file system. I've sen there's mkfs.<some filesystem name>. Is that my best / only option?