disk partitioning question

[der.hans]

Am 15. Oct, 2007 schwätzte Dazed_75 so:

> This machine has an 80 GB drive.  It originally had M$ XP Pro on it.  I then
> installed a prior version of ubuntu (it has been upgraded a time or two) but
> still left some unpartitioned space on the drive..  Somewhere along the line
> I started playing with Linux from scratch and added a 5GB partition for it.
> I just used cfdisk to look at the drive and got the following:
>
>                                       cfdisk 2.12r
>>
>>                                    Disk Drive: /dev/sda
>>                              Size: 80026361856 bytes, 80.0 GB
>>                    Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 9729
>>
>>     Name          Flags       Part Type   FS Type
>> [Label]          Size (MB)
>>
>>  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>     sda1          Boot         Primary    NTFS
>> []                31108.01
>>     sda2                       Primary    Linux ext3
>> [/]               17116.81
>>     sda5                       Logical    Linux swap /
>> Solaris                  3002.23
>>     sda4                       Primary    Linux
>> ext2                            5000.98
>>
>> Unusable                             23795.74
>>
>>
> Any idea why that last 24 GB is showing as unusable?  I seem to recall that
> a drive can only have 4 primary partitions but am not sure that is true.

Yeah, only 4 primary partitions on an IDE/PATA drive. I think the same
limit holds for SATA.

> Even if it is, there are only 3 shown as primary.  Maybe the Logical
> partition counts as one of the 4 but can contain multiple "partitions"
> within it?

Yeah, logical partition is a metapartition. In this case it looks like
it's not taking the whole rest of the partition.

Backup anything you want to save before mucking with the partitions.

Boot on a live CD.  Delete partition sda5, recreate it to use the entire
rest of the disk and add a swap partition. mkswap on the new swap
partition and update fstab.

ciao,

der.hans
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