Thanks for the report Alan,
That was very informative, and changes some of what I tell people.  Probrubly
most importants is I had (mistakenly I guess) told people that Partition Magic
did ext3 partitions.  I'll know better than to tell them that.

There is one thing that could have made your life a little (just a little) bit
easier.

During a S.L. install, on the screen before the partitioning, you can do a
<Ctrl><Alt>F2, which put's you into a shell.  You can then run fdisk from
there.  Then when you get to the partitioning part, disk druid sees those
partitions and will use them.

That just saves you the booting into knoppix step.

Troy

Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> The tale starts with some laptops (IBM R40e) delivered with XP.
>
> The plan was roughly as follows:
>
> - resize the XP partition (to about 1/3rd of the disk)
>
> - set up a Win32 partition of about the same size (can be accessed
> from either operating system)
>
> - install a version of SL into the remaining space.  We used SL301 at
> first. We allowed the installer to autopartition the available free
> space (the relevance of which may become clear later).
>
> However, later on the users complained that the XP partition was too
> small.  The only reliable tool I have for resizing an existing XP
> partition (complete with contents) is Partition Magic (let's say
> version 7.01 for example).
>
> Unfortunately, when PM was booted up, it declared the partition table
> to be corrupt (error #114) and refused to proceed.
>
> I had installed in this way on several similar laptops, and they all
> exhibit the same problem.  Attempting a re-installation of SL303 by
> using the same procedures still produced the same problem.
>
> I thought it might be helpful to run fdisk against the allegedly
> corrupt partition table, to make some irrelevant change to it, and
> then write the results back, hoping that fdisk might clean the table
> up enough for PM - but no such luck, PM still reported error #114.
>
> The only way I could get PM to do any work on the XP NTFS partition
> was to delete all of the partitions which the linux installer had
> created (*including* their enclosing "extended partition"), then I was
> able to successfully re-size the NTFS partition, and re-install linux
> as before (whereupon PM again declared the partition table to be
> corrupt, of course).
>
> A search on the web for the PM symptoms produced a suggestion that one
> ought not to let the linux installer ("Disk Druid") get anywhere near
> the partition table, but instead one should define the partitions by
> hand beforehand, using linux fdisk, and then tell the installer to use
> those existing partitions.
>
> I've just tried that (booting knoppix from CD and using its fdisk
> to define appropriate partitions - similar in size to what the
> autopartitioning had produced before).
>
> And now I can report that PM is quite happy with the resulting
> partition table!!
>
>
> So, it looks as if (at least according to Partition Magic's
> expectations) the linux installer writes a defective partition table,
> whereas using fdisk to assign partitions produced a good result.
> (Possibly partition magic could be used for that task instead, I
> didn't try it).
>
> OK, that's where I'm up to.
>
> ----
> Just a footnote to clear up a possible misunderstanding.
>
> A colleague said to me "probably your version of Partition Magic
> doesn't understand ext3 filesystems".  True enough - but it doesn't
> have any relevance to the problems described above. PM never got as
> far as considering the partitions themselves: it already walked out
> after looking at the partition -table-.
>
> And indeed, now that I've done the SL installation with a
> pre-partitioned disk, PM7 is quite happy to display the partitions and
> to allow me to resize NTFS and FAT32 partitions.  However, the linux
> partitions are shown as ext2 (rather than 3) and the resize option is
> greyed-out, confirming that this PM version doesn't support that.
>
> I know how to handle that - on an earlier occasion I resized an ext3
> filesystem using Partition Magic, by first running linux and using
> tune2fs to remove the has_journal option.  Then resize with PM, and
> then use tune2fs to put the journalling on again.  Sure, there are
> other ways of dealing with that problem, but let's not get
> side-tracked - I only wanted to make the point that PM's lack of
> support for ext3 is not the cause of the chief problem that this mail
> is about.
>
> hope this is useful to somebody.  thanks.


--
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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/CSS  CSI Group
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