Linux Newbie question

[Joydeep_1]

Hi,

I am newbie in Linux world. I have installed Linux advance server (2.4.18-e.12smp) in rx2600 server. I have two 73Gb disk. During installation I created partioned & filesystem on both disk.

Now I want to create another partition & filesystem from online.. How can I do that ?

fdisk -l does not show other partitions details. See below.

Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 8924 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 8925 71687368+ ee EFI GPT

Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 8924 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 8925 71687368+ ee EFI GPT

But as per hw-config output both disks has near about 60Gb disk space free..

I tried to find druid utility for FS creation but unfortunately I did not. I tried with fdisk but I could not.

Can anyone explain me what is extended partitions ? Also I would like to know how to create partiton & FS.

If I connect from my PC to linux box by Xwindow software, then is there any way to get same KDE window in my PC ?

[I_M]

Hi

IA64 uses different GUID Partition Table.(GPT).
fdisk on IA64 doesn't support GPT.
You may want to use parted, instead.

fdisk -l /dev/sda = parted /dev/sda print

Good luck

[Joydeep_1]

It did not help much..

See the below ourput

[root@rxlinux1 sbin]# fdisk -l /dev/sda = parted /dev/sda print

Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 8924 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 8925 71687368+ ee EFI GPT

Disk parted: 0 heads, 0 sectors, 0 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1 * 512 bytes

Disk parted doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 8924 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 8925 71687368+ ee EFI GPT

[Erik_14]

dude :)

try "parted /dev/sda print" without the double quotes :)

[Joydeep_1]

Thanks Eric,
[root@rxlinux1 usr]# parted /dev/sda print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-70007.196 megabytes
Disk label type: GPT
Minor Start End Filesystem Name Flags
1 0.017 200.016 FAT boot, lba
2 200.017 1224.016 linux-swap lba
[root@rxlinux1 usr]# parted /dev/sdb print
Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0.000-70007.196 megabytes
Disk label type: GPT
Minor Start End Filesystem Name Flags
1 0.017 4096.016 ext3 lba
2 4096.017 6144.016 ext3 lba
3 6144.017 7168.016 linux-swap lba
4 7168.017 8192.016 ext3 lba
5 8192.017 9216.016 ext3 lba

But still I did not know how to create new partitions & FS from command line or GUI

[Erik_14]

The manual page of parted can be found http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?parted+8 here. (first hit in Google)
There the commands you can use are described.

Good luck.

[Joydeep_1]

Thanks Eric,

I have been able to make partition & creating FS, but could not mount

[root@rxlinux1 root]# parted /dev/sda print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-70007.196 megabytes
Disk label type: GPT
Minor Start End Filesystem Name Flags
1 0.017 200.016 FAT boot, lba
2 200.017 1224.016 linux-swap lba
3 1224.170 3224.160 ext2 lba

[Erik_14]

Ok, what are the exact mount commands you tried? And what is the contents of your /etc/fstab ?

[Steven E. Protter]

fdisk is a dangerous tool.

There is in the linuxconf tool a gui disk manager, but I've always liked the Disk Druid at install best.

With your system in a business environment, I would have paritioned for RAID 10 1/0 so that everything including boot would work on one disk or the other.

This builds a bit of extra reliability into the system. I just had a maintenance event and though it doesn't involve the disk, I was feeling good about data recovery because I'd done that.

If you can start over, I would recommend Software Raid Red Hat. There are howto docs here at itrc and at readhat.

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-7.3-en/doc/RH-HOCS.rh1-cg-en-7.3/index.html

rh1 might be rhl

For reasons that annoy the hell out of me disk druid only seems to work 7.3 and below at install time. That sucks.

You might be able to accomplish it with the port of HP-UX's lvm utility in Linux.

Extended partitions are needed because there is a limit in the OS as to how many (4 I think) primary partitions you can have. Don't ask me why, I don't know why 4.

As far as X-Windows go, the answer is yes you can connect. Out of the box Linux installs in a secure mode and after futzing around two hours I decided it wasn't worth the effort. Its a security issue and you can solve it.

As a matter of fact posting here is a good way to resolve the issue, though I'd have one issue per thread to get people to concentrate.

Good Luck.

SEP