[Sussex] partitions and the like ??

[John Crowhurst]

> Well further to my previous, I couldn't suss out what was going wrong,
> Sooooooooo, I thought I'd have a quick squint at how Partition Magic was
> seeing things under windows.
>
> Yup, it looked exactly the same! "Bugger" thinks me.

Partition Magic will see partitions, it doesn't understand the reiser
format so it can't see how much the filesystem occupies in a partition.

> Then, in a blinding flash of inspiration (could be perspiration, as all
> this is making me sweat :-P ), I knew that the backup that I'd managed
> to make from Steve's instructions was sitting nicely in the / partition.
>
> So I figured that I couldn't really make things much worse and deleted
> the /home partition (with the PM8), and then made 2 new partitions about
> the size I wanted, formatting the first as linux ext2 and the second as
> FAT32, labeling it somewhat originally fat32!

That is looking good. Its a pity PM8 can't handle reiserfs or all your
problems would be solved.

> I then booted back into the gentoo, the boot complained a little as it
> was expecting a /dev/hda6 /home formatted as reiserfs, but I ^D'd it to
> carry on with the boot, did cfdisk and then did mkfs -t
> reiserfs /dev/hda6, then just to check, I did cfdisk again and it now
> all looks like this

When you add the fstab line, there are five fields involved:

partition mountpoint type options dump fsck

Here is some examples:
/dev/hda6  /mnt reiserfs defaults     0 2
/dev/hda1  /c   ntfs     defaults,ro  0 0
/dev/hda7  /d   vfat     user,rw,exec 0 0

Note that the NTFS partition is mounted read only, as Linux support for
writing is still in its early stages.

The numbers at the end are for telling dump (a backup program) to ignore
this partition and fsck (a 2 defines that the partition isn't the root
filesystem, and a 0 tells it not to check this partition)

-- 
John