On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 16:51 -0400, ka1ifq wrote:
On Saturday 22 October 2005 16:26, you wrote:
On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 16:08 -0400, ka1ifq wrote:
Hello All, When I tried to do an install I could not install to the partition I picked, why? I currently have 9.3 installed to /dev/hda2 (40G) with a swap and a /home. I want to do the new install and use the same swap and /home but split the 40g partition in 2 just in case I have problems so I can reinstall 9.3. What am I doing wrong? Should I boot in another mode and delete the 40G partition first? Tia Mike
Hi Mike Its hard to understand if you don't send all the details so I assume you have / (suse 9.3) 40gig swap /home (your stuff - docs downloads etc..) ? Run fdisk -L as root or sudo fdisk -L and mail me the output.
Thanks for the reply, here is the info:
Disk /dev/hda: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 128 1028128+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hda2 129 5350 41945715 83 Linux /dev/hda3 5351 7476 17077095 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hda5 5351 6264 7341673+ 83 Linux /dev/hda6 6265 6655 3140676 83 Linux
/dev/hda1 is my swap (first mistake) /dev/hda2 is my / (40 gig) /dev/hda5 is my /home (73 gig) /dev/hda6 is a storage area (31 gig) Never make swap the first partition, all cmos's are prone to buggering up boot sequences, esp if you disable search for other boot devices. My advise is... Wipe out hda 1 and 2 Then create a 100MB /boot followed by 2 x 20 gig, It will probably swear at you because it wants to make another extended partition or something like that, so be sure to force the 2 20gig partitions to be primary's leave a bit of space,,, about 500MB for swap. Then set your mount points and DO NOT format your /hda5 and 6 :) First load the OS you will use least often as it will be the second in the boot menu after you load the second OS. Without the boot partition you are at risk as boot is always the partition that crashes first,, the reason being that you may try booting from a stiffy or CD-Rom (like KNoppix 3.xx beta) which will attempt to update the boot menu. And break it.. (My personal experience) Once the system is running perfectly I suggest you run dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/home/boot.img and make a backup that can be restored by booting a recovery disk or the suse recovery on installation cd 1. Let me know how you progress.... :) Chadley
Chadley Wilson wrote:
On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 16:51 -0400, ka1ifq wrote:
On Saturday 22 October 2005 16:26, you wrote:
On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 16:08 -0400, ka1ifq wrote:
Hello All, When I tried to do an install I could not install to the partition I picked, why? I currently have 9.3 installed to /dev/hda2 (40G) with a swap and a /home. I want to do the new install and use the same swap and /home but split the 40g partition in 2 just in case I have problems so I can reinstall 9.3. What am I doing wrong? Should I boot in another mode and delete the 40G partition first? Tia Mike Hi Mike Its hard to understand if you don't send all the details so I assume you have / (suse 9.3) 40gig swap /home (your stuff - docs downloads etc..) ? Run fdisk -L as root or sudo fdisk -L and mail me the output.
Thanks for the reply, here is the info:
Disk /dev/hda: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 128 1028128+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hda2 129 5350 41945715 83 Linux /dev/hda3 5351 7476 17077095 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hda5 5351 6264 7341673+ 83 Linux /dev/hda6 6265 6655 3140676 83 Linux
/dev/hda1 is my swap (first mistake) /dev/hda2 is my / (40 gig) /dev/hda5 is my /home (73 gig) /dev/hda6 is a storage area (31 gig)
Never make swap the first partition, all cmos's are prone to buggering up boot sequences, esp if you disable search for other boot devices.
That's never been a problem, I've done that quite often in the past.
My advise is... Wipe out hda 1 and 2 Then create a 100MB /boot followed by 2 x 20 gig, It will probably swear at you because it wants to make another extended partition or something like that, so be sure to force the 2 20gig partitions to be primary's leave a bit of space,,, about 500MB for swap. Then set your mount points and DO NOT format your /hda5 and 6 :)
First load the OS you will use least often as it will be the second in the boot menu after you load the second OS.
Without the boot partition you are at risk as boot is always the partition that crashes first,, the reason being that you may try booting from a stiffy or CD-Rom (like KNoppix 3.xx beta) which will attempt to update the boot menu. And break it.. (My personal experience)
Once the system is running perfectly I suggest you run dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/home/boot.img and make a backup that can be restored by booting a recovery disk or the suse recovery on installation cd 1.
Let me know how you progress.... :)
Chadley
Whoa! that looks drastic and complex. No one has ever explained to me the advantages other than you can screw things up if you rm -rf a partition or rm -rf / which won't guarantee /home doesn't get clobbered before you can stop it. Even Sun has gone away from slicing disks up into little bits, it seems a hangover from the days 20 years ago when you could only obtain small disks, inevitably you ran out of space and ended up with symlinks to here there and everywhere. I have 1 / and 1 swap partition on Solaris SPARC, SuSE boxes, Mandriva boxes and on 1 gentoo box. The only time I have ever had problems, a few or four times, it's been a bad IDE controller that ensures your entire disk is broken and that's all the way back to when Linux used bootlace and shoelace from Minix to allow booting from hard disk. Even a fresh install or upgrade over an existing system doesn't touch /home unless you format /. The KISS principle does work. # fdisk -l /dev/hda 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 18457 148255821 83 Linux /dev/hda2 18458 19457 8032500 82 Linux swap / Solaris Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks
On Sunday 23 October 2005 02:46, Sid Boyce wrote:
Chadley Wilson wrote:
On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 16:51 -0400, ka1ifq wrote:
On Saturday 22 October 2005 16:26, you wrote:
On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 16:08 -0400, ka1ifq wrote:
Hello All, When I tried to do an install I could not install to the partition I picked, why? I currently have 9.3 installed to /dev/hda2 (40G) with a swap and a /home. I want to do the new install and use the same swap and /home but split the 40g partition in 2 just in case I have problems so I can reinstall 9.3. What am I doing wrong? Should I boot in another mode and delete the 40G partition first? Tia Mike
Hi Mike Its hard to understand if you don't send all the details so I assume you have / (suse 9.3) 40gig swap /home (your stuff - docs downloads etc..) ? Run fdisk -L as root or sudo fdisk -L and mail me the output.
Thanks for the reply, here is the info:
Disk /dev/hda: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 128 1028128+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hda2 129 5350 41945715 83 Linux /dev/hda3 5351 7476 17077095 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hda5 5351 6264 7341673+ 83 Linux /dev/hda6 6265 6655 3140676 83 Linux
/dev/hda1 is my swap (first mistake) /dev/hda2 is my / (40 gig) /dev/hda5 is my /home (73 gig) /dev/hda6 is a storage area (31 gig)
Never make swap the first partition, all cmos's are prone to buggering up boot sequences, esp if you disable search for other boot devices.
That's never been a problem, I've done that quite often in the past.
Agreed. Unless Chadley has put it badly where you place Linux partitions is almost irrelevant.
My advise is... Wipe out hda 1 and 2 Then create a 100MB /boot followed by 2 x 20 gig, It will probably swear at you because it wants to make another extended partition or something like that, so be sure to force the 2 20gig partitions to be primary's leave a bit of space,,, about 500MB for swap. Then set your mount points and DO NOT format your /hda5 and 6 :)
I'm trying to decide if Chadley is suggesting you have a common /boot. Do not do this if you are letting SuSE YaST Online Update take care of the kernel updates. The two different versions of SuSE will have different kernels, and there'll be chaos when the other OS B tries to boot using the kernel from OS A, and vice versa.
First load the OS you will use least often as it will be the second in the boot menu after you load the second OS.
Without the boot partition you are at risk as boot is always the partition that crashes first,, the reason being that you may try booting from a stiffy or CD-Rom (like KNoppix 3.xx beta) which will attempt to update the boot menu. And break it.. (My personal experience)
This also sounds like nonsense. It doesn't matter if boot is seperate, or part of the root partition. If some external media messes with the conents of boot, you still have a problem that needs fixing. Slap in the SuSE media and run a repair. Boot was used as a way of getting around cylinder limitations and all that crap, but it's also useful when you have LVM's, RAID'd disks etc. that the MBR code won't be able to figure out.
Once the system is running perfectly I suggest you run dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/home/boot.img and make a backup that can be restored by booting a recovery disk or the suse recovery on installation cd 1.
So you suggest he burn up a massive chunk of his home partition with an image
of what will probably be a 10 - 20% full partition. You'd have to be in the
rescue system anyway to do the above dd command, so there won't be any
strange files to confuse tar, so just do:
# mkdir /mnt/home
# mkdir /mnt/root
# mount /dev/hda<x> /mnt/home
# mount /dev/hda<y> /mnt/root
Let me know how you progress....
:)
Chadley
Whoa! that looks drastic and complex. No one has ever explained to me the advantages other than you can screw things up if you rm -rf a partition or rm -rf / which won't guarantee /home doesn't get clobbered before you can stop it. Even Sun has gone away from slicing disks up into little bits, it seems a hangover from the days 20 years ago when you could only obtain small disks, inevitably you ran out of space and ended up with symlinks to here there and everywhere. I have 1 / and 1 swap partition on Solaris SPARC, SuSE boxes, Mandriva boxes and on 1 gentoo box. The only time I have ever had problems, a few or four times, it's been a bad IDE controller that ensures your entire disk is broken and that's all the way back to when Linux used bootlace and shoelace from Minix to allow booting from hard disk. Even a fresh install or upgrade over an existing system doesn't touch /home unless you format /. The KISS principle does work.
You really don't want to have to rely on upgrades always working. Old configs and various cruft hanging about will give you grief. Always a good idea to at least seperate /home and do fresh installs without touching /home.
# fdisk -l /dev/hda
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 18457 148255821 83 Linux /dev/hda2 18458 19457 8032500 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Assuming a ~60GB partition, my suggestion for the OP is: /dev/hda1 /boot 50M (SuSE 9.3) /dev/hda2 /boot 50M (SuSE 10.0) /dev/hda4 extended rest of disk /dev/hda5 swap 1024M (OK to share, as long as not using suspend-to-disk) /dev/hda6 LVM rest of disk /dev/system/lv_root_9_3 10G (SuSE 9.3) /dev/system/lv_root_10_0 10G (SuSE 10.0) /dev/system/lv_home 30G This leaves ~10G spare which can be tacked onto the existing partitions if you find later that you're running low on space. LVM is a pain to learn the first time, but it gives you great freedom managing your disks. If you buy a second harddisk you can even add that capacity to the partitions on your current disk. Also note that some programs might complain if you run a newer version in 10.0, it writes to a users config files, and then you try to run the older 9.3 version. You could get round this by having a different home dir for the different versions, i.e. /home/name93 and /home/name10 Looking at the layout of the current disk it may be that the easiest way to get a sensible layout would be to add another harddisk. -- Steve Boddy
participants (3)
-
Chadley Wilson -
Sid Boyce -
Stephen Boddy