hi everybody i am a new user and i am totally new in opensuse world so i’d like to understand some things and i hope someone will be so kind to answer me, thanks in advanced.
ok, so i installed opensuse on my pc and i’ve two hard disks one is 80 gb and the other one is 320 gb now i’ve installed window xp on the smaller 'disk and i installed suse on the bigger one, now if i open a program called partitioner it displays that the smaller one it’s still the same instead on the bigger one there are 5 patition:
1- sda1 NTFS 162.52
2- sda2 Extended 135.57
3- sda5 Swap 2.01
4- sda6 linux native ext4 20.00
5- sda7 linus native ext4 /home 113.55
now i’d like to understand why there are so many partitions and if some of them can be deleted and wich one is the partition with all the files i’ve saved before i installed suse on the 320 HD
Thank u in advanced and sorry for my ignorance in this field :)
Hi, In the future, can you post an explicit title please. Please help me doesn’t say anything about your problem.
IMPORTANT : don’t delete any of the partitins above. There all needed.
For the info :
sda1 -> windows partition
sda2-> extended partition->needed
sda5 to sda7 are the partitions used by openSUSE : root (sda6), /home (sda7) and swap (sda5).
IMHO, your questions are very normal for a newbie to be asking, however you’ll not get the attention you’re looking for from the folks far better qualified than I to help you until you create a post with a title that’ll catch their attention. The guys you want to reach are very busy and don’t have time to read every vague post with a non specific title like “Please help me”.
I’d suggest a title like “newbie needs help with partitioning”
Having said that, and with very little information to go on, I suspect that your old files are on sda2, but only you can be sure that those are the files you’ll be comfortable deleting. I’m guessing that that 320Gb drive had a whole lot of your files created under Windows and the partitioning you describe was set up to shrink it as sda2, leaving enough space for your files and then adding the sda5 - 7 paritions for Linux.
well the above dose look a bit messed up .It will work but it looks like there are some missing partition names
could you post he output of this command
su -
-- your root password when asked --
fdisk -l
the "fdisk -l " command will list all partitions and needs to be ran as root
with two hdd’s there should be output for
sda( the first disk)
sdb ( the second disk)
from the above it looks like xp and opensuse are on ONLY ONE disk( the same disk) and not on two
have you read the
"beginners guide " ?
openSUSE 11.3 | SUSE Linux | Beginner’s guide to multimedia codecs MP3 DVD 3D nvidia ati wireless
or the novell docs?
Novell Doc: OpenSUSE 11.3 - Table of Contents
and on partitioning
– a bit old but the basics are the same –
Linux Partition HOWTO
http://rute.2038bug.com/node22.html.gz#SECTION002210000000000000000
On Sun, 07 Nov 2010 05:36:02 +0530, rafsorv
<rafsorv@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> hi everybody i am a new user and i am totally new in opensuse world so
> i’d like to understand some things and i hope someone will be so kind to
> answer me, thanks in advanced.
> ok, so i installed opensuse on my pc and i’ve two hard disks one is 80
> gb and the other one is 320 gb now i’ve installed window xp on the
> smaller 'disk and i installed suse on the bigger one, now if i open a
> program called partitioner it displays that the smaller one it’s still
> the same instead on the bigger one there are 5 patition:
> 1- sda1 NTFS 162.52
> 2- sda2 Extended 135.57
> 3- sda5 Swap 2.01
> 4- sda6 linux native ext4 20.00
> 5- sda7 linus native ext4 /home 113.55
> now i’d like to understand why there are so many partitions and if some
> of them can be deleted and wich one is the partition with all the files
> i’ve saved before i installed suse on the 320 HD
> Thank u in advanced and sorry for my ignorance in this field :)
don’t delete any partitions, they’re all needed. your previously saved
data should be in sda1 (hopefully), and the other partitions are all part
of your openSUSE system; they’re all required. you can learn more about
oS’s partitioning here:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/unreviewed-how-faq/389511-partitioning-install-guide.html
.
–
phani.
thaks a lot to everyone, i’m sorry for this misleading title but i didn’t know what to write to indicate my problem, i’ll be more accurate next time, i hope i didn’t disturbe any of you…and i’m gonna read some more guides 
it’ll be better
Thanks again, hoping someone will still help me in the future if i’ll need more help
Hey rafsorv, a warm welcome here.
Some comfort: nothing wrong with your partitioning:
The first one is your Windu install
The second one is an extended partition, i.e. it’s a container for some logical partitions. It contains"
- swap: the space used to store things temporarily if RAM is not sufficient, also the space where your system’s state is stored during suspend to disk
- the root filesystem
- the partition containing user data, i.e. /home
This setup has one big advantage:
On a next install, you can leave /home untouched, so that your settings/mail/appearance etc will be available in the new setup. The oldest parts in my /home on my server date from 1998, just to illustrate.