How o use hidden space in suse/linux
 

Hi experts,

I have a new laptop running both winXP and suse10.1 in dual boot. however, i seem to have
made a mistake in partitioning. I am not using all 100GB, I sem to have missed about 10 GB.
Now I cannot seem to get to use it.

here is my current fdisk listing.


Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 383 3076416 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/hda2 384 6241 47054385 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda3 6242 9368 25117627+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda4 * 9369 10674 10490445 83 Linux
/dev/hda5 6242 9302 24579450 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda6 9302 9302 7969+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

When I first partitioned I saw that I had cylinders upto about 12000+, but now I see only upto 10000+, and the sum seems less than 100GB.

i tried the repartition avail in Suse10.1, but it says that I need to first unmount /dev/hda4 to resize, but that is the linux partition that is in use. So I seem to be stuck.


I don't want to make big changes since I have everything running nicely and only miss about 10GB.

Any clever ideas out there..??

thanks,
redrobin77.
:scratch:

I'm not a hard drive specialist, however i can say that sounds about right. i have 2 100G harddrives, which in the end show as 93.xxGigs all drives are like this. don't forget you also have a file system installed as well it too takes up space and the MBR. when i put in a new 40G HD in my laptop it actually showed as something like 35 or 6 G.

Hi,

Are you saying that I am actually not missing space then?

thanks.
rr77.

I don't see how you are missing any space. It also appears that you are using a Compaq computer. HP and Compaq place hidden partitions on the disk for use with their system recovery (About 4GB). Also if you have Windows XP installed, it will reserve about 7MB for itself. Also the numbers used by the drive manufacturers are misleading as the space measured by the computer (in binary and sometimes HEX) must be converted into base 10 so that humans can understand. In other words the computer calculates it diferently than you do. Remember there are 8 bits to a byte. The larger the number, the more skewed it will appear.