Which File System to use?

[DutchGeek]

gore: i read the partition magic book and it said that it doesnt support reisrfs, but does that mean that it considers the whole harddisk BAD? And even when i use the partitioner that came with suse it says that it cannot resize and/or remove any partitions on that harddisk (except to start from scratch), what do you think is the reason?
@tt!tud3: what excactly i have is: storage1, storage2, systemxp, system2000 on 80 GB hdd, C (full), D(full), P(empty partitions used in past for backup), root (/), swap on 40GB hdd. I want to remove P partition, and increase size of root partition.

-pease help me to find a way to do it without whiping the whole hd

thanks

[gore]

I don't think I've ever heard of someone resizing reiserFS or moving it. And yea Partition Magic would say that. As I said before, you're probably going to have to start from scratch because you're using more than one HD with 3 OSs and the time it would take to even attempt to move all this around.... You'd most likely lose most of the data on them. Even I've never attempted that. Not that I had a reason, I'd usually plan the install out more.

From the looks of it you have the second HD with something but "P" on it. You could possibly use cfdisk /dev/hdb1 or whatever you have it set up as to create partitions on that drive and mount them under Linux so it can use the new space on there.

For example:

One box here has two HDs. I installed Linux and when the second HD was installed, I just opened up cfdisk and formatted that drive how I wanted it partitioned, and them mounted it as /home so i could store things on it. You can mount it however you want but there is a limit hardware wise to how many primary partitions you can use on one computer per HD.

[nihil]

As I have mentioned, Gore is the expert. What I do know is that I have seen a fair number of people screw up with partition magic, and that is just in a Windows environment

I would agree with Gore's suggestion and back up and start again. Even if you got it going by some miracle, you could have no confidence in its stability, which I would have thought was one of the major selling points of Linux?

[DutchGeek]

nice idea to mount the backup as /home now i have a way more room for files and even programs, i`d install them in /home/bin. And what about the files who are already in /home?

-thanks

[gore]

Well, you could create more than /home. See you can create mount points however you like. As an example, when I set up a server, I don't want any fragmentation (Even though this RARELY occurs) but I don't want to risk that on partitions where servers are using them, so I create a seperate mount point for each part of the system so that fragmentation on something like /var won't blled over to another one where I want speed.

You could do something like this and make one for /home and another for /usr if you wanted more room for programs. It's really up to you. With Windows you're generally stuck with a partition and a "file" for swap space, in Unix, swap is seperate so fragmentation isn't bleeding into it, and you can mount and unmount file systems with one command, no reboots. Another reason I prefer the Unix way of doing something.

[DutchGeek]

okay, im going to mount P as /home formatting it as reiser and mounting it as/home, but a warning says:
warning you have changed the FSID of an existing partition, in some cases this could lead to serious consequenses especially if you change the FSID of a partition belonging to another operating system, only proceed if you know exactly what you are doing.
can i proceed?

-thanks

[gore]

Think it's time you invest in a book on Linux and some HOWTOs on partitioning. Seriously it's going to help you out.

[RoadClosed]

How did it corrupt your HD?

A lot of times people forget to defrag their windows system and end up cutting the linux partition off too short leaving lost files out in a non existance space. Windows just goes, WTF, shits it's pants and runs into the closet.