160 g HD only shows up as 9.2g

brucenolan
What version of Mepis are you using? If its 6.5 RC2 I would boot from the live cd and open gparted and have a look. I would suspect (if my memory serves me correctly) that use chose use entire disk during install (maybe wrong on that but 9.2 GB sounds familiar. At any rate login as root when you boot from the cd and see what gparted has for you. You may just need to set up the rest of your drive. You can do that with gparted. If you are using an older version of Mepis you can either use QTparted from the live cd to do the same thing. From my experience it is a little buggy though. Another option is to download gparted and burn the image and boot from it. Good luck and have fun

Well first things first. Does your bios see the drive as 160gb? What kind of hardware are we dealing with? What did you partition with and what did you have in mind for sizes? With that size drive you have a lot of options and what you intend to use it for will have a bearing on the way it should be setup. If the bios sees it properly i would use cfdisk from the cli , it has never failed me. And it can be used from the live cd with no problems just hit ctrl alt f1 or f2 & log in as root root or use your installed system to setup with the same method and just type cfdisk after log in & hit enter. Its a simple program that uses the arrow keys to navigate & enter key to apply. Main thing to know is the numbers 82 defines swap and 83 is linux when choices are made. Mepis installer will format the drives when installing. Oh and the / or root partition should be marked bootable. Need more info to do anything but point out general guidelines.

jim EDIT; Another key point is to reboot after changing or making partitions so the OS and bios will make note of changes. Saves a lot of strange problems.

awesome responce from two users! thanks! I'm running 6.5 RC2 in a P4 3.40 ghz with a 945 intel board 1 GB ram and the HD is SATA. when I installed 6.5 I just accepted the default configuration, maybe that was wrong, but what happened was aramok could not see my SMB:music so I copied 4G of MP3 over to SDA1 and thats when I noticed I was using 75% of the drive and I thought what the heck? 160GB and only seeing 9.2GB? the bios sees all 160GB so what? I have to repartition? or can I mount the rest of the drive? I'm new to this but want to mack it work, I don't like the direction the "other" os is going and prefer this path so thanks for the help!! cfdisk or gparted what is the difference?
thanks guys
bruce

well cfdisk tells me I have sda1= 10 GB, sda2= 1GB and sda3=141GB but I don't see any thing about 82 or 83 oh and sda1 is bootable so do I need to change anything or? how do I get to sda3?
thanks for the help
bruce

gparted looks pretty cool, I'm afraid to touch anything! so it shows I have sda1 =9.2 , sda2=1GB, sda3=131gb and 6.9GB unallocated why would that be?

thanks for the help
bruce

Boot into Mepis an open konsole type kdf at the prompt and hit enter post what you have in there.

Well it looks like you didnt pick the home partition on install. Have a look at /etc/fstab file or kwikdisk or kdiskfree to see where you are at.

With a drive that size i would think about the future needs, like a backup part or a few parts to play in without borking my main one. Course thats up to you but if it were me i would split up the drive and reinstall since it takes a short time. I like making my own partition scheme for just in case situations and testing. You probably should pay more attention to the installer as its a sweet piece of work allowing complete control of what gets put where and allowing home to be on its own partition not to mention other options like where to put grub. You can repartition the drive as is if you don't have home on the 141gig part also without reinstalling, linux is flexible you will find.

jim

here is a copy and paste from cfdisk,I couldn't figure out how to paste from kdf. it looks like sda3 has most of the drive, do I need to repartition to access that or is there a better way to use it?
Disk Drive: /dev/sda
Size: 160041885696 bytes, 160.0 GB
Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 19457

Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sda1 Boot, NC Primary Linux ext3 10000.01*
sda2 Primary Linux swap / Solaris 1000.00*
sda3 Primary Linux ext3 141626.00*
Pri/Log Free Space 7413.28*

thanks jim, I know linux is flexible, but I have no clue where to put home or how big to make partitions thats why I just went with the default installer values. I am used to the "evil empire" method where HD space just shows up. I did try mounting sda3 and an icon showed up on the desktop as "141G media" I guess that will work? I moved all MP3 onto that and can click on the icon and see them. advantages or disadvantages?
bruce

the mount does not survive a reboot, why? can it be made to?
thanks jim for the help

The first thing is to find out if home is in root. Hit the home icon then the red root folder icon and expand the home folder with your user name and see whats in there. If there is a desktop folder etcetra there, home is in root. Then you can make more partitions in empty and the large one with the tools of your choice. It all depends on what you have in mind to do. Options are almost unlimited to extent of drive size. If you play with movies and music you might want some larger parts.

Linux is about choice, much more than that other OS you will find in short order so have a little fun and experiment. Actually you don't have to commit all the drive space at one time slice off what you need now and leave free space, if you like till you decide whats needed. Also within reason drives can be resized without too much trouble. So at this point what's your pleasure?

jim

well I have nothing specific I want to do with this box, just not install windoze, so I've accomplished that already. I just want to use all of the HD and that seems doable just by mounting sda3, but is there a reason I would want to do it differently?
thanks
bruce

If you like it as is go for it. You did read my posts?

jim

If you chose to use your entire disk for MEPIS, then around 10GB would be allocated for your root partition, 1GB for your swap partition and the rest for your home partition. Sound familiar?

So if you accepted the defaults during the rest of the installation, and if you haven't changed it, you should have a very large home partition.

If you open System>InfoCenter>StorageDevices you should see /dev/sda3 mounted as /home and a list of stats regarding its usage.

Jim; oops sorry I did read your posts but got ahead of my self, home is in root, does that mean root should be in sda3? to take best advantage of all space on the HD?

warren: mepis and nothing else will be on this drive. I like mepis and thats my final answer:-) so I see with cfdisk that I have 7 GB free besides sda1, sda2 and sda3 mepis installer didn't want that?

Yep i think you,ll find ten gig wont last too long with the average user. I suspicioned home was on root by your first post. So you have basically two options reinstall or reclaim all your drive space by partitioning & moving home or.....

Did i say two options? Well you get the idea. Install scripts can only cover so many bases, lot of different scenarios on drives these days. If you decide to move home check the wiki at top of page for info.

jim

thanks Jim, I will check the wiki, but will probly leave it as is for now till I learn more... or I reinstall from the next RC..
thanks all who contributed
bruce

thread closed