Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Think before you partition

[Technical]

This is how Fdisk's report of my secondary (as of now) hard disk read:

Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1216 9767488+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 1217 6079 39062047+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda3 6080 7991 15358140 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 7992 8150 1277167+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda5 1217 6079 39062016 b W95 FAT32

Now, I had to create a new NTFS partition to run PostGRESQL from Windows.
This is impossible in the current scenario because a (almost any) system can support a maximum of 4 primary partitions and exactly 1 extended partition. Anyone good with partitioning will recognize this scenario a big headache (to convert this into a proper partition table with no space wasted; I don't believe in partition resizing tools - better slow than data loss). All I've left to do now is to move data from my 30 GB partition into my 10 GB one, tar and move my Linux home folder, and then trash and recreate the whole extended partition and install FC5 again.

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