Hey all, I’m new to linux so please humor me if this is really simple. I pulled out an old laptop yesterday with XP, no one remembered the password so I booted it to the openSUSE disc and proceeded to nuke the windows partitions and install Suse. Upon finishing it up and checking everything out, I realized I don’t have much storage on my OS location. I’ve got a /dev/sda which is 74.53GB’s and the type shows a HDD looking graphic followed by a model number. Then I’ve got /dev/sda1 which is 15.99Gb’s and that has extended next to it. The next is /dev/sda5 with 2.01Gb and linux swap, followed by /dev/sda6 with 6.13GB linux native EXT 4 and “/”, and then /dev/sda7 with 7.85Gb’s linux native next to it with “/home.” I’m assuming I messed something up so any help to correct this would be excellent.
Ughhh haha, is there no way to do it after the fact and just extend the volume? it took a while on this old junky T43 but I can probably get it started tomorrow at some point. What do I need to do?
Hi
You could try getting the space back via the live Rescue CD and gparted, not sure if it will be successful, but I guess no harm in trying, but I believe that this would take longer than a re-install on a T43.
If you download the rescue cd from http://software.opensuse.org/131/en (I’m guessing it’s 32bit) burn to a cd and boot from that and run the gparted application and try resizing the extended partition…
Else, when installing at the partition setup part, select the custom option to use all the disk space and not on an extended partition.
If its easier to just start from scratch, then I’ll do that. Do I need to format anything before hand or can I just boot to the CD and run the install and I guess just have it overwrite everything?
Hi
Yes, just delete all the existing partitions (including the extended), create new ones and it will overwrite, since it’s only an 80GB I would recommend either no separate home or something like;
I have openSUSE 12.3 running on one machine with an 80-GB HD since 12.3 came out, machine has 2-GB RAM, running superb in all this time.
I have another machine with 2-GB RAM, it was running **openSUSE **12.1 since it came out, installed openSUSE 12.3 when it came out, recently installed openSUSE 13.1 and still going strong, all on a 60-GB HD.
Both systems do a lot of MultiMedia playback and Photography processing.
Hi
Having worked on a T43 with XP and 1GB of RAM a few weeks ago, they are not speed daemons… putting swap first will benefit performance when (and in this case it probably will) it’s used since it’s the fastest part of the drive. The more RAM the less likely it’s used during normal operations so it can be moved (I generally put at the end) I don’t use big drives, this laptop has a 128GB SSD, my wife’s laptop has a 60GB SSD…
… one of my reasons for liking Linux. Breathes new life into those older machines when switching from XP or other MS OSes.
And, indeed, on a low-resource machine, the swap tends to be used frequently and the first partition is the fastest (in the old days, defragging HDs, you would place the most-frequently-used modules at the front of the drive to increase performance).
On 2014-02-28, Zach1928 <Zach1928@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> Hey all, I’m new to linux so please humor me if this is really simple. I
> pulled out an old laptop yesterday with XP, no one remembered the
> password so I booted it to the openSUSE disc and proceeded to nuke the
> windows partitions and install Suse. Upon finishing it up and checking
> everything out, I realized I don’t have much storage on my OS location.
> I’ve got a /dev/sda which is 74.53GB’s and the type shows a HDD looking
> graphic followed by a model number. Then I’ve got /dev/sda1 which is
> 15.99Gb’s and that has extended next to it. The next is /dev/sda5 with
> 2.01Gb and linux swap, followed by /dev/sda6 with 6.13GB linux native
> EXT 4 and “/”, and then /dev/sda7 with 7.85Gb’s linux native next to it
> with “/home.” I’m assuming I messed something up so any help to correct
> this would be excellent.
Thank you for your description but it would help if you output the following…
On 2014-02-28 06:56, malcolmlewis wrote:
>
> Fraser_Bell;2627597 Wrote:
>>
>> BTW: For benefit of New Users, Malcolm, maybe you could explain why it
>> is a good idea to put swap in the first partition?
>>
> Hi
> Having worked on a T43 with XP and 1GB of RAM a few weeks ago, they are
> not speed daemons… putting swap first will benefit performance when
> (and in this case it probably will) it’s used since it’s the fastest
> part of the drive.
That’s a common belief, but it is not always true. On this machine, the
faster section of the disks is at about 1/3 of the way.
I tested this by creating about 50 partitions, formatted them, and
running speed tests on each of them, years ago. Different disk brands or
models could behave differently. And of course, doing the test requires
having a system on one disk, an empty disk, and time to do it…
I just bought a new disk, and I forgot to do this test. Too late, it is
already populated
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
> And, indeed, on a low-resource machine, the swap tends to be used
> frequently and the first partition is the fastest (in the old days,
> defragging HDs, you would place the most-frequently-used modules at the
> front of the drive to increase performance).
Yes, but that had a different reason
In FAT partitions placing first directories, then often used files
worked faster because for reading a file you need first to locate the
directory entry, then read the FAT table entries. As the FAT is
mandatory at the start of the disk, the tendency was also to place
directory entries nearby, so at the start of the disk.
Then much used files were placed early because they were close to those
directory lists.
Another combination was to place the directory metadata close to the
directory contents (files).
The basic idea was to minimize disk head movement, between all those
operations, not because I/O throughput was faster at the rim of the disk
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
On 2014-03-03 04:06, Zach1928 wrote:
>
> Where is the best location to start learning from scratch?
That’s a new, unrelated question. Better to ask in a new thread with an
appropriate tittle, and in the appropriate subforum.
I’d suggest you search first on the looking-for subforum, for instance,
or the chit-chat one, because that question has been asked before and
surely you can find suggestions there.
