Harddrive size recognition problem

[Turtle 0]

Well I resently Installed Mandrake 10 on my computer, completely replacing Windows XP. during the setup my C: drive was identified as a 37gb hard drive. when I started up my computer I noticed that at the "file/" that the size of my drive was about 6gb. I auto-matically assumed that I installed linux on a second drive I had Installed that was about that size to put my music in. I removed the secondary HD and reinstalled Windows XP. When I checked my C drive it was still at 6gb. When I googled my question I saw that the most frequent answer was that the Bios were set to that size but, but when I checked my Bios, my C drive had a capacity of 40gb. Can someone please help me get the rest of my HD space back. I am extremely new to Linux so I'm sorry if this is a stupid question. Thanks

[taeuler 0]

I don't have a definitive answer, but I have some suggestions for getting started. if you still have Windows XP installed, you can go to "control panel(with the "custom view") -> Administrative tools ", there you will find a tool for drive formating, there you can see if you primary drive has been partioned into a 6-gig section and then the rest of the drive. My guess is that the Mandrake installer partioned you drive. I havn't used Mandrake so this is just a guess. Hope this helps.

[danleff 0]

If you told Mandrake to take over the drive, most likely Mandrake created a root file (which would be / or root), a swap partition and a home partition.

 

When in Mandrake, go to start-->system-->configuration-->configure your computer.

 

Click on the mount points icon, then the partitions icon.

 

You should see the partitions on the drive and how they are set up. Click on any colored partition image and you should be able to see the partition types, designation and size of each partition.

 

Does this add up?

 

What are the partition types, designations and sizes?

[damienb2003 0]

Hi,

 

I installed Mandrake 10 this afternoon and after much annoyance with this same issue i worked it out.

 

User error? Hmm more like User not knowing what he is doing! I setup my second HDD and Windows 98 saw it as 37Gb. I ran Mandrake and clicked on Partitioning, and had no idea what was what. Its not exactly labelled that well.

 

I installed it, to find i had 5gb of HDD on a completely blank 40Gb hdd. I did FDISK in DOS and deleted all partitions and started again, yet when i set a new extended DOS partition it came up with 5Gb. I figured Mandrake mustve done something so i ran installation again. This time in the partition section i cleared everything on that HDD, put a 6Gb swap and then hit Auto Partition. Making sure it took up the whole drive space. Went ahead with the install and now i have Linux on a 40 gb HDD.

 

Windows wont recognise the other HDD which is good.. prevents a certain other half downloading more MP3s!!

 

I used only the 1st disc (am yet to finish the other 2 iso's.. come on i was eager).

 

Now i have to get my head around Linux... Any links/info on how to set up the net with Linux?

 

Damien

[danleff 0]

I'm not sure if this is the problem both of you had, but it seems that you all are looking in windows at your partitions? Fdisk and Windows do not see Linux partitions. Windows will only see what is Windows based, such as dos and fat filesystems.

 

So, if you used Mandrake's partitionig tool to use free space on the drive (on the windows partition), then you will not see the linux partiitons in dos or windows. Only what is allocated to windows. The rest of the drive is allocated to Linux and can only be seen by Linux, or a partitioning utility tool, like PartitionMagic.

[Dapper Dan 0]

Rather than just letting Mandrake partition for you, you have much more control if you partition your HD manually. Mandrake has the best partitioning utility of any distro I've used, and it's very intuitive. Just create a /, a swap and a /home partition. I always make / and /home around the same size, and the swap partition about 3 to 4 times what my ram is unless it's on a box with 512 ram. Then I don't use a swap at all as it really isn't needed, and will actually slow you down over forcing everything through 512 ram.

 

Also, RieserFS is the way to go as far as file systems are concerned. Don't use EXT2 unless you want to wait forever for it to check your drive after cold shutdowns.