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Originally Posted by Mercurius
I want more space for slackware. And I want to take that space from either hdb1 or hda1. Here is the list :
Disk /dev/hda: 20.4 GB, 20490559488 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2491 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1957 15719571 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 1958 2464 4072477+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 2465 2491 216877+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 2465 2491 216846 82 Linux swap
Disk /dev/hdb: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 4865 39078081 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
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I can't tell from this how big your Win95 machines are. I mean, I can tell how big they are defined to be, but not how much is in use.
Judging from this info, it would seem to me that the best way to go would be to resize the FAT32 on /dev/hdb to be smaller because /dev/hda looks pretty full with no room to move unless you want to reduce your Win95 machine from the 15G you have assigned to it. And that doesn't seem like a reasonable possibility because there isn't a way to configure another partition between 1 and 2 unless you're willing to wipe whatever you have on the drive after your Win95 system and start over.
Right now you have the whole 40G drive for Win95 on /dev/hdb. This is pretty similar to what I was dealing with (40G all assigned to one Windows machine) but I had only one drive.
If you don't need all that real-estate on /dev/hdb for your Win95 machine then you can do the following:
a) defrag your Win95 machine thoroughly until it is all contiguous (as much as possible, and this make take a few times/several hours). What we want to accomplish here is to get everything moved towards the front of the partition so that you will really have free space. When you have done that, determine how much space you are using for Win95 and how much you want to have for that machine. For example, you may find that you have 12G used but you want to leave yourself another 20% for expansion. So you will want to set your Win95 partition to 12G + 20% = 14.4G. That will leave you (approximately) 22.87G left. Remember, the disk manufacturers and their pals would like us all to believe that 1G = 1,000,000,000 bytes. You and I know that it is really 1,073,741,824 bytes. So you have less than 40G on a 40G drive. Just play along and it will be ok, except at the end you will perhaps wind up with less space than you actually thought you had.
b) download and burn a Kanotix live-CD (not necessary if you have another live CD with qtparted on it).
c) start Kanotix live and use qtparted to reduce the size of the FAT32 partition on /dev/hdb to whatever you calculated in a). qtparted is a graphical tool which is pretty intuitive and seems to work, two nice features alone. For our example, resize the partition to 14.4G. Please remember at all times NOT to work with the wrong drive, or we will all be sorry for you.
d) reboot the system. It could well be that Win95 will go through a very scary and lengthy scandisk/chkdisk. This is ok and should be no cause for alarm. It should then boot normally (and actually after that, it may run better than it did before).
e) bring up your live CD and partition the drive the way you want using fdisk. The first thing to do with fdisk is option p to print your partition table. Apparently you have been through all/most of this before since you have your /dev/hda partitioned, but I am repeating it for the dubious benefit of anyone who never did it before and wants to- because if I had this guide when I started I would have been a little better off. Write down or make a copy of whatever you have, because if something goes wrong you'll need that info to restore it.
f) decide how many partitions/what sizes you want. Using the m option for menu, you can add new partitions and then assign whatever types you want. BE CAREFUL TO MAKE SURE THAT EVEN IF THE DEFAULT STARTING CYLINDER SHOWN WHEN YOU ARE ABOUT TO CONFIGURE A NEW PARTITION IS THE SAME AS THE ENDING BLOCK OF YOUR WIN95 MACHINE, DON'T USE IT!!! Make sure you use the NEXT cylinder. I don't know why fdisk seems to want to split/share the last cylinder, but NO GOOD CAN COME OF IT!!!
g) use option p liberally, making sure that the partition table is how you want it. When you are sure enough that you are willing to risk screaming and hair-pulling, use option w to write the partition table.
h) reboot with the live CD
i) do an fdisk -l to make sure everything is ok
j) now you can configure extra directories in your linux machines (I can't help much with this- either search for info on /etc/fstab entries or ask around)
Good luck,
Rand
P.S. Can anyone think of another situation where someone buys a big bunch of something and they get 2,949,672,960 (that's over 2 billion!) less things than what they were supposed to get, and nobody sues? And that's only for a "40G" hard drive. Of course it gets much worse on big drives.
