Today, I came across an interesting observation about fdisk on Redhat
and on SuSE. It is about how the two versions of fdisk handle unallocated
space. Where as Redhat Version didn't report unallocated space as a
partition, the SuSE's fdisk did.

Here is a snapshot of harddisk..

| hda1 | free | part-1| part-2|
|<--Pri->|<-- extended --->|
the free space above is just a free, unallocated space. It's not even an
unformatted partition.

Here is a snapshot of Redhat's fdisk.
/dev/hda1
/dev/hda5
/dev/hda6
(there is no mention of free space)

and Here is SuSE's fdisk
/dev/hda1
/dev/hda5 -> refers to free space.
/dev/hda6 -> part-1
/dev/hda7 -> part-2.

i am curious to know if anyone experienced this before?
Because of ths difference, I lost one partition today, while installing SuSE

That is strange

If it was not partitioned then why would it show up as /dev/hda5?


If it was then why would it matter if it were formatted?

I noticed this too, except that it was the difference (in RedHat) between fdisk and cfdisk. cfdisk saw my free space, but fdisk did not.

Try cfdisk /dev/hda and you should see the free space. I actually wrote a query about this, but have yet to have a definitive answer on it.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...&threadid=8768

The Start and End on each partition here is consecutive..

Are you saying that there could be free space in between somewhere and I would not see it?


Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1048 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 7 56196 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda2 8 1048 8361832+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 8 1015 8096728+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda6 1016 1048 265041 82 Linux swap

Command (m for help):

Well,
I have seen suse report the free space as a partition. Therefore the start and end section in SuSe's fdisk is contigous.
However, thats not true with redhat. Redhat doesn't report free space as a partition, instead your eyes should be descerning enough to match each partition's end value to the start value of next partition. If you see the do not relate (or if there is a big gap between them), then you can infer the in-between space as free space.
Ravi

That's what I thought. :-)