Odd Partitioning Problem

[laplacian13]

I was using openSUSE but ran into some trouble that would require me to reinstall the OS, so I decided to just try out mint instead. I went into the mint installer, selected to manually edit my partitions, and used the partition tool to delete the openSUSE partitions (/, /home, swap). I was left with my windows 7 partition and a bunch of "free space", so I hit back (I just wanted to use the tool to delete the partitions), and then had mint install alongside the other operating systems.

Everything installed fine, but now when I boot, I have the options to boot into mint, windows 7, or openSUSE. I went into mint, installed GParted, and looked at the partitions. There were two partitions exactly of the size that openSUSE had for / and swap, so I deleted them and reinstalled. It then gave me a "could not find grub error".

Pretty "Oh, rainbows!" moment, so I put my mint cd back in and decided to just try to reinstall. I deleted the mint partitions and once again went to set up my own partitions, but this time decided not to have it do it for me. I did /, /home, and swap (is swap with 6GB good with 4GB ram?) and it installed fine again. As before, windows had /sda1 and /sda2, but oddly enough when I made my partitions they went to /sda5 /sda6 and /sda7, as if there were two partitions occupying /sda3 and/sda4...strangely reminiscent of before. When I restarted my computer there was no option to boot into openSUSE (woot woot did it right this time) but I'm still curious as to why it went to /sda5 /sda6 and /sda7. Is this normal? Are there hidden partions or something? Will the odd partitioning scheme affect mints performance?

[SimonTS]

1) 6GB swap is plenty with 4GB RAM
2) You can have up to 4 primary partitions - these take the labels 1, 2, 3, 4 on your drive or you can have 3 primary and 1 extended partition. If you create an extended partition then the first logical partition will ALWAYS be 5 - because the system needs to leave 1 to 4 free for any 'missing' primary partitions which you may later need to creat (a primary MUST be numbered between 1 and 4).

[laplacian13]

Did I create an extended partition though? Wouldn't I have had to select that?

[SimonTS]

You must have done so or you would only be able to use partitions 1 to 4. To check exactly what you've got, open a terminal window and type

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

(that's a lower-case L, not a number 1). That will show you all the partitions, including the Extended partition which isn't listed otherwise. Or you can install gParted from the Package Manager and use that for a graphical representation of the drive layout.

[laplacian13]

So this is the output I got:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc496b391

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 154 1228800 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 154 36238 289844730 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 36238 57635 171874305 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 36238 38669 19530752 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 38669 56906 146483200 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 56906 57635 5858304 82 Linux swap / Solaris


So I guess I do have an extended partition then. What about /dev/sda4 though? It's missing from that list.

[SimonTS]

/dev/sda4 is reserved for if you create another Primary partition on that disk.