[NTLUG:Discuss] Disk partitions under linux

[Leroy Tennison]

terry wrote:
> On 5/18/07, Leroy Tennison <leroy_tennison at prodigy.net> wrote:
>   
>> I have a 120GB Seagate hard drive which I use for experimentation, right
>> now I have several distributions installed and set up for multi-boot
>> from a single menu.  There are two primary partitions (/boot for 107MB
>> and a user data partition for 3010Mb) followed by an extended partition
>> (80GB) containing: 10.7GB (CentOS 5), 1077MB (swap), 10.7GB (SuSE 8.2),
>> 10GB (Fedora Core 5), 10GB (SuSE 9.2), 10GB (empty ext3), 12GB (empty ext3).
>>
>> Questions/issues:
>>
>> At one point I thought I saw a partitioning utility which listed free
>> space but can't seem to get that kind of listing any more, is there a
>> program or switch I'm missing?
>>
>> This disk should have about 36.9GB of free space but when I try to
>> create a new primary or extended partition nothing happens - no error
>> messages but no new partition either.  What's wrong?
>>
>>     
>
> What kind of drive is it?  IDE, SCSI or... ?
>
> Have you tried just using fdisk (from command line), to create the new
> partitions [on the free space]?  If so, what was the result?
> If you haven't tried it, do so.
>
>
> And; [just out of curiosity]:
> What does "fdisk -l" report [about this drive]?  (Show us.)
>
> What does /proc/?/?/capacity report about this drive?
>
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>
>   
It's an IDE drive, the problem was an IO (Idiot Operator) error. Let's 
just say that I was less than attentive.

/proc/ide/hda/capacity showed 234441648, not sure what the units are.

Both fdisk and parted showed that it was a 120GB drive.

Both fdisk and parted were able to create an additional primary 
partition. I was probably thrown off on fdisk because it created 
partition 4, I already had 11 partitions and was looking for a new entry 
at the bottom of the list. Not sure what I did with parted.

Discovered that at least parted will show free space if you use 'print 
free' or 'p free' instead of just 'p'.