partitioning question

[Ken Moffat]

Kurt Wall wrote:

>On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 01:35:55PM -0700, Ken Moffat took 26 lines to write:
>  
>
>>I recently added an 80gig western digital oem to one machine as a slave, 
>>and used BootIt-NG to partition it into 10 gig reiserfs partitions, with 
>>hdb4 as extended and several logical partitions, hdb5-9. However, there 
>>are .03meg spaces between each partition labeled /dev/hdb-1. Some are 
>>labeled hidden, some not.
>>    
>>
>
>Odd. I have a WD 120GB drive (/dev/hdb) formatted thusly:
>
>Disk /dev/hdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
>255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
>Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
>
>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>/dev/hdb1               1         244     1959898+  83  Linux
>/dev/hdb2             245         732     3919860   83  Linux
>/dev/hdb4             733       14593   111338482+   5  Extended
>/dev/hdb5             733       14593   111338451   83  Linux
>
>Notice that there are 31 unused blocks on the extended partition.
>The logical partition (/dev/hdb5) uses the entire extended partition.
>fdisk's v(erify) command tells me there are 5227 unallocated sectors,
>which means I have 2,676,224 bytes, or just a shade over 2 MiB not used.
>In both of our cases, I'd just chalk it up to administrative overhead.
>It does sound strange, though. What if you partition with something other
>than BootItNG (of which I've never heard)?
>
>Kurt
>  
>

BootItNG is a boot/partition manager, and has worked flawlessly on 
several drives which were WinXP or ME for adding linux partitions. They 
have a free trial. The partition manager is sort of like PM or QTParted. 
I don't use the boot manager option.

I'd like to try a different tool, but am not willing to repartition at 
present. Maybe if something were not working...

I read that fdisk's 'maximize' option is used to expand a linux 
partition to all usable space, but loses dos compatibility. (not that I 
need that). So I assume bootit defaults to dos compatibility. I guess I 
should have used qtparted or cfdisk, but having had success in the past 
with bootit, I took the path of least resistance. How unlike me... ;-)

-- 
Ken