Floppies and Linux

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Since I started to use html and CSS to create my presentations (instead of OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office), even quite large presentations fit on regular 1.4MB floppies. Thus I popped an empty floppy into the drive and formatted it as ext2. Funnily the GUI floppy mounter is not able to recognise the file system when it is set to autodetect. Thus I formatted as MS-DOS and the autodetect file system works. Strange…

Some partition rearrangements under Linux

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Linux installation is as follows:/dev/hdb1 100 MB /boot/dev/hdb2 8 MB /home/dev/hdb3 8 MB //dev/hdb4 Extended partition/dev/hdb5 1 GB Linux swap/dev/hdb6 100 GB NTFSThe idea was to use the 100 GB partition (/dev/hdb6), which has been formatted with the NTFS (= Windows 2000) file system to store large files under Linux. NTFS file systems cannot be used by Linux yet. The only DOS/Windows filesystem, that is compatible with Linux is FAT32. Unfortunately FAT32 is a quite inefficient system and has a maximal partition size of 32 GB (actually Windows can use FAT partitions up to 127 GB, but it cannot format them itself, one needs a third party utility to format them). Anyhow, Linux can only read and write to FAT partitions up to 32 GB. An additional requirement is that /dev/hdb6 should be mounted to two different mount points. Therefore we have to split this partition into 2 smaller ones. Now this appeared to be impossible under Linux. The reason of this is - like with so many other things that suck - Bill Gates. Similar to his “640KB RAM is enough for everybody” decision, he decided that only four primary DOS-type partitions can be on one physical hard drive. Soon this appeared to be too little and thus a work-around was introduced: “Extended Partitions”. One of the four primary partitions of a disk can be a so-called “extended partition” and contain several (actually I think unlimited amount of) logical partitions. Thus in the above layout of the hard disk /dev/hdb partition number 4 (/dev/hdb4) is an extended partition. It contains two logical partitions: /dev/hdb5 and /dev/hdb6. The problem is the following: The Linux utilities cfdisk and fdisk cannot access these two logical partitions separately. If we want to split /dev/hdb6 into two smaller partitions, we first have to delete this partition and then create two new ones in its place. But both cfdisk and fdisk can only delete /dev/hdb4 as a whole. That would delete the Linux swap partition (quite a disaster while you are running the operating system).The way how to solve the problem is the following: Boot into Windows 2000, delete the 100 GB NTFS partition and created two smaller ones instead (/dev/hdb6 and /dev/hdb7). You have to format them FAT32 or NTFS as Windows cannot do anything else. If you have Partition Magic 8 or higher (preferably on a boot floppy), you can immediately format the two new smaller partitions as Linux partitions (that is: ext2 or ext3). Reboot into Linux. Funnily when mounting the partitions that were formatted using Partition Magic 8, already 5 percent of the space is already occupied although there are no files anywhere (at least this is what the Hardware Browser/Hard Drives utility shows). To reclaim this lost space you have to reformat them under Linux using the command mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb6. If you want to use the newest (and probably one of the best) file system for Linux, you can format them with the ReiserFS file system (command: mkfs.reiserfs /dev/hdb6). Reboot and add those partitions into the fstab file to automount them on startup.

Ext2 on Michael’s Domain

Floppies and Linux

Some partition rearrangements under Linux