need partition help

[ahurd]

My drive is partitioned as follows:
/sda1 ntfs 12g win2000
/sda2 ext3 16g /home
/sda3 ext3 11.7g /
/sda4 extended 13.6g
/sda5 swap 2g
/sda6 ext3 11.7g reserved for another kubuntu OS
unallocated space 400g

In gparted I click on unallocated and am told I cannot create more than 4 primaries and must create extended. Ithink I have already done this. What is going on? Help appreciated.

[Snowhog]

Re: need partition help

It's not possible to confirm your statement from the listing you provided. Open a console and type:

sudo fdisk -l

Copy/paste the output in your reply.

[walfred]

Re: need partition help

What happen is you already have an extended partition. This one:

/sda4 extended 13.6g

An extended partition is a special primary partition. System advices you should create an extended partition, but you already have done it. Indeed, the warning should be
"Enlarge your extended partition in order to create new logical partitions"

Actually, I don't know if that is a good idea. If (and only if) you don't have data stored on the logical partitions I believe a good advice would be deleting /sda5 and /sda6 and /sda4, then you recreate /sda4 using all the space available on disk.
Do not leave unallocated space, unless you know what you are doing. Particularly, I don't see any reason for it...

[ahurd]

Re: need partition help

Snowhog, heere it is:
albert@ALBERT:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for albert:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe0472aba

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1912 15358108+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 1913 5736 30716280 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 5737 7266 12289725 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 7267 9051 14338012+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 7267 7521 2048256 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 7522 9051 12289693+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 4005 MB, 4005560320 bytes
16 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15280 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 512 * 512 = 262144 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4cac1014

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 16 15280 3907648 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)


Do you agree with Walfred?

[Qqmike]

Re: need partition help

It appears that Walfred is right.

/dev/sda4 7267 9051 14338012+ 5 Extended
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Extended partition ends at:
9051 * 1 cyl = 74,447,009,280 bytes
But
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes

Thus, if you try to create another primary partition, since the Extended is full, GParted thinks you want it as a main primary (but not in disk order), but you already have 3 primaries plus the Extended (= 4 primaries).

You've got 500 GB on that drive but your Extended extends only to 74 GB.

[ahurd]

Re: need partition help

Many thanks.