fdisk - issue

[kurianthayil]

Hi,

I use Debian Etch in my Acer Aspire 5583 NWXMi laptop. It has a HDD capacity of 120 GB. Its a dual boot system with Fedora 8. But I don't use it much. My current fdisk -l output is given below:

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1020     8193118+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            1021        1033      104422+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            1034        3583    20482875   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            3584        9657    48789405    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            3584        4888    10482381   83  Linux
/dev/sda6            5999        6129     1052226   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7            6130        8562    19543041   83  Linux
/dev/sda8            5285        5998     5735173+  83  Linux
/dev/sda9            4889        5284     3180838+  83  Linux
/dev/sda10           8563        8988     3421813+  83  Linux
/dev/sda11           8989        9657     5373711   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

As you can see in the first part immediatly after the command, it says I have 14593 cylinders. I created partitions in such a way that, till sda3 was made primary and then rest extended - logical. I still remember fdisk -l showing output with End as 14593 as Extended. Now its showing only 9657. Why is this? Any suggestions? Thank you in advance.

Regards,

Kurian.

[devils casper]

It means there is an unpartitioned free space in your HD. I would suggest you to boot up machine through PartedMagic LiveCD, merge free space in Extended Partition and resize existing or create new partitions.

[kurianthayil]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. Was wondering why this happened. After creating the first 3 partitions primary, I directly made the rest to be extended and it showed 14593 in extended. But how critical is it using PartedMagic LiveCD? Is there a chance that my system would crash? Do I need to do a backup?

Regards,

Kurian.

[devils casper]

PartedMagic is one of the best Partition Manager. There is no need to backup. If you have any confusion, just boot up from it and check partition structure. You will know where rest of space has gone. Its easy to merge free space through PartedMagic.
There are a lot of useful tools in PartedMagic. You can create bootable compress image of disk ( PartImage tool ) or recover partition table ( Testdisk ) easily.

[kurianthayil]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion my friend. I will try out this and will get back to you.

Regards,

Kurian.

[kurianthayil]

Hi,

Thanks my friend. Parted Magic worked beautifully and I didn't loose any data. It was a safe journey. And hey I would really appreciate if you could tell me why this has happened and also is there an alternative than parted magic (some options in fdisk)??? So that I don't have to depend on a live cd when things go wrong. Just curious. Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Kurian.