[Westwales] GPT partition tables

[Colin Sauze]

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>Colin, pardon my further ignorance but what are GPT partitions?
>I can't easily paste the partition table in here 'cos this exercise is 
>happening on another machine and I have yet to fathom the intricacies of 
>linux networking :-)  
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GPT partition tables are a new kind of partition table invented by intel 
to overcome the limits of the old ones (4 primary partitions max etc), 
they actually work by placing a partition in an old style dos paritition 
table and then having another table inside that GPT partition.

If you were to have a GPT table used by one OS (I think Fedora uses 
these) and another (mandrake doesn't use GPT by default) were trying to 
make partitions in the Dos partition table things could get very confusing.

You can display the contents of your partition table by typing (as root) 
fdisk -l /dev/hda or (if you have GPT partitions) parted /dev/hda print. 
You can get this information remotely if you ssh into the machine and 
execute these commands as root.