Help: Linux Installation!!!

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

Teja:

Please keep all correspondence on-list. This makes sure that everyone gets 
the benefit of both the question and the answers and it records the 
dialogue for the archives, so the whole community grows. One-on-one help is 
called consulting or tech support, and I charge money for those!

Also, keep replies BELOW the original text, so the whole conversation 
follows a logical top-to-bottom order. Replying above the original text 
leaves the conversation in reverse, in effect putting the answer before the 
question. More importantly, it annoys the hell out of a lot of people on 
the list since it makes conversations very difficult to follow, and you 
will get more help if you follow the local customs.

Having said that, your missing gigabytes are quite easy to find. Here is 
the output of "fdisk -l" and "df -m" you provided:

At 22:48 2/21/2004, you wrote:
># fdisk -l
>
>Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4865 cylinders
>Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
>/dev/hda1   *         1         7     56196   83  Linux
>/dev/hda2             8      4865  39021885    5  Extended
>/dev/hda5             8      3520  28218141   83  Linux
>/dev/hda6          3521      3627    859446   82  Linux swap
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------
># df -m
>Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
>/dev/hda5                27124      1032     24714   5% /
>/dev/hda1                   53         4        46   7% /boot
>--------------------------------------------------------------------

You can see that the disk has 4865 cylinders, and that /boot is using the 
first 7 cylinders as /dev/hda1. There is an extended partition (/dev/hda2) 
covering the rest of the disk, and your real Linux partitions (the / 
partition and the swap partition)  are inside that. But note that your root 
partition /dev/hda5 is only 27GB in size, using cylinders 8-3520. Your swap 
partition then uses cylinders 3521-3627 (roughly 800MB swap). The rest of 
your disk, cylinders 3628-4865, is not assigned to any partition.

I suggest you use parted (included in Red Hat Linux) to move the /dev/hda6 
swap partition to the end of the disk, then grow /dev/hda5 to use all the 
available space. You should be able to recover it all quite easily.


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com