Help please

[stuarhol]

Hi All

Have used partition manager on my 360g external disc and it has created a partition called f: \Linux with 75g. My problem is its not showing the rest of the disk that was called G: although it is shown in the device manager as Seagate but no drive letter assigned.
I have done a system restore to go back before partition manager and its cocked everything up. The external disk is still showing Linux 75g and now I've lost partition manager. Is there any way I can get the disk to show its full capacity and its drive letter and not just the Linux partition f:\Linux?

[techieMoe]

Hi All

Have used partition manager on my 360g external disc and it has created a partition called f: \Linux with 75g. My problem is its not showing the rest of the disk that was called G: although it is shown in the device manager as Seagate but no drive letter assigned.

What OS are you looking at the harddrive in? MS Windows does not recognize Linux-formatted partitions as drive letters. You have to view them in the Administrative Tools-> Computer Management program. It will show up as a healthy non-native partition. Linux does not use drive letters.

I have done a system restore to go back before partition manager and its cocked everything up. The external disk is still showing Linux 75g and now I've lost partition manager. Is there any way I can get the disk to show its full capacity and its drive letter and not just the Linux partition f:\Linux?

If you're just concerned with getting your drive to show its full capacity and you're not worried about losing the data on it, I'd recommend just doing a clean wipe. You can do it with fdisk, or use one of the Seagate tools on this bootable CD:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

[Draciron]

Download Knoppix
www.knoppix.org
click on the American/English flag for the English version of the website.

Burn the ISO as a bootable image. In K3b you'll find this under tools. Not sure where it is with windoze burners.

Then boot with Knoppix. I think it's system, click around on the various menus until you find either Gparted or QTparted. This will give you a Partition manager like display of your partitions.

I think the F: you were seeing was what you named your drive. Linux doesn't use drive letters. You actually name the partitions. In the top right hand corner you'll have something like /dev/hdc if you have more than one drive click up there to switch between the drives.

Next you'll have a breakdown of partitions, type, filesystem, size, name if it's mounted normally as a certain drive. In your case it'll probably read F: as that's what you named it. You want to change the mount point for that drive. The F: will throw lots of Linux users off. Instead mount it as / since thats your sole Linux partition apparently. If you mounted it as F: you'll have no /boot and be unable to boot from the HD. So mount your primary Linux partition as /

If you have empty space that will be easy to see. You can click on it and format whatever file type you want. For partitions you want to use with Linux format them as ext3 or as LVM. This is the partitioning scheme I recommend.

Seperate partitions for
/ - this is your partition for system utils, libs and the tmp dir. Depending on distro and what you have to spare and size I'd recommend from 4-15 gigs for this partition. With a 75 gig drive and most modern distros IF your not duel booting I'd say 8 gigs would be plenty.

swap - this doesn't get a name. Normally make this the same size as you have physical RAM.

/home - The reasons for a seperate home dir is that first if you get a runaway .xsession or other log file that writes to your home dir your machine doesn't complain and act strange. Second if you upgrade or lose your / partition the /home and it's data will still be there. It's also easier to just back up a whole partition. I usually keep this small as I try to keep only configuration files here. So 3 gigs is plenty if you use your data partition for everything else.

/data - Whatever space is left. This makes it easy to back up the dir. Even if you get runaway log files you can still download files if you set your default dirs all to point here for data files and downloads. Keep your mp3s, downloads and everything else here. That way you don't accidentally fill up your home dir with a file that your downloading which is bigger than you expected. Do that and lots of apps complain, a few even just quit on you without a usable err message.

First thing to do after installing your OS is to chown [yourusername] /data that way you can use it. Until then it's owned by root and inaccessable to most users.

Hope this helps. If your still having trouble just email me or pull me up in IM. draciron at yahoo or gmail or for IM on YM or AIM.