had posted this in another forum but I believe this is the better place since its RHEL4 update 4.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to go through Michael Jang's book "RHCE Study Guide", the book is based on RHEL3 but I'm working on RHEL4 (not sure if it matters for my question).

One of the exercises in the book (page 138) says "create an extended partition containing all the rest of the disk space and make it growable".

I don't see anywhere in the Disk Druid setup (during install time) that allows me to specify a new extended partition. Am I missing something here or reading this wrong? I don't see anyway to create a partition without a mount point which looks like he did from his chart on that page. The partition is marked "Extended". Any ideas or is this something that is different from RHEL3 to RHEL4?

thanks

RedHat and Fedora Core typically allocate all your space during the install if you let them. If enough space they'll put /boot on a partition then create VolGroup00 (Logical Volume Manager [LVM]) on another partition and put most of the space there into / (root) into a logical volume in VolGroup00.

You can see if you have this kind of structure by doing by doing df -h to see what you have mounted. If you see logical volumes in the output you can do vgdisplay to see what you have.

Synopsis: You may not have free space to play with due to the above default allocations.

So I studied and practiced from the same book for my RHCE. I would say you need to study creating the logical volume during install and then modifying the sizes later. It's good to know how to do it in X, but you should also be able to do some command line work.

Keep in mind you can do lv<tab> and pv<tab> to see lists of options.

Hope thats helpful...

I don't see anywhere in the Disk Druid setup (during install time) that allows me to specify a new extended partition.

Actually when you create a partition table using disk druid it first created 3 primary partitions and once its done it automatically creates the 4 as the extended partition and it starts creating logical drives into it. In fdisk you have a choice of creating a extended partition at the first strike.

In case you wanna break the default vg created by disk druid you can try using the "vgsplit".

I am also studying for RHCT exam from Miachael Jang book for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. The system I am working on is a version 4 system. I was also at first confused by the same question to create an extended partition. You create an extended partition by first creating the other 3 partitions he had listed /boot, swap, /. When creating these check the box at bottom to "Force to be primary partiton". Then go to next step to create logical partition for /var (do not set to force to be primary partition). After this partition is created if you look at what is listed as partitions you will see that disk druid automatically made an extended partition for you and assigned /var as its fist logical partition. Then you can go to next step and create the two software RAID partitions and then made RAID device out of them.

Lots of luck studying