partitioning ext drive

[Eric "Shubes"]

betty wrote:
> hi eric;
> thank you for your response; i'm just now able to get back to this 
> drive; i am running redhat 9.0

Good to know.

> df command does not show the ext drive only hda1,2, etc

Good. Then we know it's not mounted.

> i followed your advice and made these commands to 1- make sure the sda 
> was not mounted and 2 put the space in before the /dev in the fdisk 
> command. here is the output
> 
> [root at bigdog root]# umount /dev/sdb
> umount: /dev/sdb: not mounted

Ok to do just to be safe, but really not necessary. We know that it's 
not mounted from the df command.

> [root at bigdog root]# fdisk /dev/sdb
> bash: fdisk: command not found

Ok. Now, the shell (bash) is telling us that it can't find the fdisk 
command.

> so i did a "man fdisk" without the quotes, and all the appropriate 
> how-to's on fdisk came up.
> ?
> thanks for your patience.

Ok, so if the man pages are there, then I think we can safely assume 
that the package which contains fdisk is installed.

You're apparently the root user, as indicated by your command prompt.
How did you log into the root account? I'm guessing that you might have 
done a "su" or "su root" from a normal user account, although if you 
did, you subsequently also did a "cd", because you're at root's home 
directory. When su-ing to root, it's generally a good idea to do a
"su -". That way, you pick up root's login environment, in particular 
root's $PATH variable, which should include the /sbin directory (where 
fdisk resides on RH9). If /sbin isn't included in the $PATH variable 
("echo $PATH" to check), then the shell (bash) doesn't know where to 
find fdisk.

In any case, if the program you're trying to run isn't in your present 
$PATH, you can specify where it's located in your command:
# /sbin/fdisk /dev/sdb

That'll get you to the fdisk program. Let us know what the result is. 
I'm afraid that since you said earlier that there's no /dev/sdb device 
on your system, that fdisk won't be able to find it. Once you're able to 
run fdisk successfully, we'll figure out what your drive's device name 
really is, and if the kernel's seeing it. I think that "dmesg" will 
probably tell us that.

> i will copy the previous email below in case you didn't recall them, but 
> not to jumble up the above.


-- 
-Eric 'shubes'
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