Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
andreas.sumper@nimbus.at wrote:Hi! belahcene <belahcene@iap-cu.dz> wrote on 25/11/2004 10:57:25 AM: > Hi every body, > I have a machine with only ONE partion where win$ is installed, > I want the equivalent of magicPartition ( something like diskdrake of > mandrake on debian), either on windows or on linux ( to run it from > knoppix) to create a new partition without loosing the content ( in> general after using fdisk to resize, the window$ doesn't run correctly> ) of window$.You can use qtparted (or qpartet, I'm not sure about the name) It is included in knoppix at least since 3.4Presume that's just a frontend to parted. But parted always gives me messages about "a strange layout" although it is a brandnew partition created with cfdisk!I used to keep XP around for partition magic until the time it messed up my linux partition so bad I had to trash it.Now I use resize2fs, which does the job. H.
I don't know about any 'strange layout' error, but 'couldn't align the partitions properly' is a problem I have had nightmares with. d-i twice broke windows on me (windows didn't like partition table after parted messed it up, it converted the whole thing to standard CHS or something similar; note that this was with the same d-i netinst cd on differnt computers), one requiring a full reinstall because I couldn't deal with the problem and the other I managed to convert the table back to something sane again. The whole fiasco was caused by Linux not using LBA for my disk drives. Linux doesn't detect LBA at all--I have to set it manually whenever I do partitioning or bad things happen. This is doable by typing 'echo bios_head:255 > /proc/ide/hdx/settings' before using parted/sfdisk/etc. I also have a hdx=c,h,s in my grub's menu.lst to bypass Linux's nondetection of LBA addressing. Linux is a hardy system, as it can use CHS on big drives without issues, however the fact that it refuses to detect when a partition table is aligned to LBA causes big problems for _other_ systems. I've lost massive amounts of [unimportant/backed-up] data and time due to disk addressing problems and programs which cry about partitions that aren't aligned to cylinder boundaries (this is terribly uncessary, why do they still demand this as in medieval times?). The state of things these days is terrible--too many hacks (ezbios/drive..*shudders*) and programs which just can't cope. (there was a time when I could boot into windows and linux but Partition Magic wouldn't dare touch my partitions which it detected as bogus, they really need a 'realign partitions with current geometry' option. Plus depending on who you ask (the OS, the bios in different interrupts) you will always get different geometry. Linux CAN cope, but it can also break things for other OSes. Be forewarned.. partitions need to be managed with care!
Michael Spang