Laptops :: why cant I see my entire disk



Having finally managed to install DSL with frugal_lite. and then using a combination of fdisk and cfdisk I have created my last partition /dev/hda4 which is almost 1Gb in size.

I am trying to download th current.iso image onto here so i can use the DSL menu to install frugal onto my laptop and do away with the floppy. But everytime I try, after 20MB or so it says system is full...if I type

df -f

it only lists the ramdisk and /dev/hda2 which I set as 100MN and where my DSL image is stored..

anyone tell me what I am doing wrong and how  I access my 900MB???? It is getting frustrating, I am so close but just missing out.
You need to also format the partitions. The install will automatically format the first partition because it needs a place to write the image. However, you will then need to format the other partitions using mkswap and mkfs.ext2. Here's a pretty good tutorial:
http://www.lissot.net/partition/Partition.html

P.S. Linux does not need Primary partitions, logical partitions will work just fine. Logical partitions start at hda5, which makes it easier to visualize them as separate from the Primary partitions which are hda1 to hda4.
ok so I checked in cfdisk and I have:

/dev/hda1     swap           270.44MB
/dev/hda2     primary       105.29MB (DSL image)
/dev/hda3     primary       105.29MB
/dev/hda4     primary       962.01MB    (HOME) (BOOTABLE)

is this good or bad?

following some of the instructions on that link and did:

mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda4
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda3

followed by:

mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /tmp
mount -t ext2 /dev/hda4 /home

when I next do df -h I can see my drives including my 900MB /dev/hda4. Here I have called it /home, will this confusing for the other /home that is a link to /ramdisk?? When I try to save the current.iso from ibiblio,org agaon after 20M it says full...duh? If I cannot call them /home and /tmp as these already exist what can I c all them??

As you can guess I am new and my set up is very cowboy style...if anyone suggests naming /dev/hda3 and hda4 in a different/better way please do so.

PS. Whilst I did all this, when I right click on my desktop and choose something I no longer get any response either. (double) duh?
I'm thinking part of the trouble may be having your swap on hda1. I tried the same thing and things just messed up all over the place, so I went back to cfdisk and put my swap at the end of the drive instead. The problem is that Lilo needs to write to the frist sector of the drive to boot, and swap won't allow that. What I would do if my system were set up like yours would be to use parted to create a swap partition at the end of the drive, format it as swap, and then reinstall to hda1. I would then go back and recombine partions til I just had one for the system and one for swap.I can't guarantee it will work flawlessly, but it's what I would try.
Normal proceedure is o put your swap right after your boot partition. delete all of those partitions. Make hda1 your Primary with the boot flag toggled on and install or (better) frugal install to that partition. It only needs to be 50 MB for frugal. Make the next one a logical drive and twice the size of your RAM. It will automatically be labeled hda5. Set that as swap (type 82) and use mkswap /dev/hda5 on it just to make sure it's formatted as a linux swap file. Next set the last free space the same way as a logical linux (type 83) partition with cfdisk and use mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda6 to format it. Now you can frugal install DSL with grub or lilo, to hda1 and it will see the swap when you next boot up. You can edit the menu.lst file for the grub boot menu so that it adds backup and persistant /opt and /home to the hda6 partition. This is the most simple way to make this all work.
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