[Whiteskin]

Ok, this is frustrating. To start, I'lll just give a rundown of my drive, as it is now.

hda1 /boot
hda2 /home
hda3 swap
hda4 /

(Don't ask how that happened. It's a combination of saving old data, and not being used to the gentoo install)

Anyhow, I realize now that I made my swap partition much too big (Well, not as big as some have, but I digress). I'd like to cut it in half, and use the 300mb left over as a media partition where I can tote around songs/videos etc.

The problem is that If i use cfdisk (from my gentoo livecd), and delete hda3 and create either an extended or primary partition, smaller than the swap, the rest of the space is labled as "unusable". Fdisk is slightly better (or worse), as it lets me create an extended partition at the end of *gasp* one cylinder.

What is going on here, and how is this correctable?

[tsunam]

hmm white I'm not sure ~_~; fdisk is the way to do it but it only creates a 1 cylinder extended partition? You should be able to chose if you want it at the beginning or at the end? Have you tried it at both and seen if it still is only one cylinder? If so I'm not sure if there's a way to get around it without doing a reformat since moving your / to hda3 would wipe it...

If you need to reformat ~_~ you might want to think about doing a
hda1 /boot (tiny)
hda2 /home (whatever you need)
hda3 / (small to big depending on what you want for it)
hda4 extended
hda5 /usr (fairly big since this is where portage is)
hda6 swap (your nice small swap)

I you notice as well there's been a lot of talk about not needing swap any longer in linux....so that's something to consider as well

[Whiteskin]

Oh I need swap on this box... 64mb of ram. Sure, I might say I didn't need swap if i had 512.

I Don't know. I think the problem is that the partition is in the middle of two other primary partitions. So,A reinstall may be the only way to reclaim that space. Oh well, not right now.

[saikee]

Your problem is pretty clear to me.

All hard disks can have only 4 primary partitions hda1 to 4.

If you want more partitions then one of the primary must be turned into an extended partition, which cannot be created in Linux but gives birth automatically whenever a logical partition is created. Only one extended partition is permitted. If you have two extended partitions it would be a mistake because the DOS-based partition table will not be able to find both.

Linux starts the first logical partition always as hda5.

There is no possibility for you to delete a primary, recreate another primary of smaller in size and use the space left over because there is no extended partition in your system. The left-over space in the hard disk can not be addressed because it is outside the partition table capability of a hard disk used for a PC.

You should be able to delete hda3, create a logical partition, which will immediately take up the hda5 designation, for swap and using the remaining space for another 20 logical partitions if you want. The catch is your Linux kernel will be lost as it can't find hda3. The hda3 exists only in name only as an extended partition that you haven't created but came into being the moment a logical partition is ordered by you. The extended partition is a box only encircling all your logical partitions or physically marking the boundary between the end of your hda2 and the beginning of hda4. The logical partition has a reduced partition table inside pointing to hard disk location of its next logical partition in the consecutive chain. Thus we can,t have a break in the extended partition or to redirect it the unused space in the hard disk.

I haven't done it myself but it may be possible for you to amend the boot menu file, fstab and mtab files to tell the kernel the swap is now hda5 instead of hda3, to keep your Linux going.

[Whiteskin]

Perhaps... I think next time though, I'll do a complete wipe. But this is fine for now. During a recent emerge I broke my swap usage record. Perhaps one day I'll actually use a large chunk of swap.