Whatever your Partition Commander is doing it doesn't seem to me that it is "commanding" as the partitions seen by Solaris no way representative of your orginal scheme.

Yes I think Solaris has picked out the Swap thinking it might be a data partition. For partitioning work I would go with the cfdisk program in Linux, which is obtainable from any Live CD. Remember you have to reboot to allow the partition table to become permanent. It is mandatory for Dos partitions but does no harm in all type of partitions. You can write partition type "bf" for Solaris as it will recognise that is its residence without any assistance.

I am not going to diagnose the difference between your original partitioning scheme with the final one reported by Solaris as so many things might have go wrong. If c0d1s0 or hdb1 was your original partition then you should only go ahead with the Solaris installtion if is everything agrees. As things stand your Solaris isn't even in the biggest partition as orginally intended.

Does that mean I have to prtition second HD (HD2, where I am planning to put both Solaris and Linux ) by using this utility, or I have to partition HD1 (Where both Windows OSs reside)as well ?



My understanding to what you said, that this table stuffed up (you could not dignose it) because I have used partition commander utility ?

I do not use Partition Commander as Linux's own cfdisk and fdisk are excellent internal tools available in every Bash shell. You have to watch out for the Red Hat family and its variants which in place of cfdisk they have sfdisk instead. Haven't seen a Linux that haven't got fdisk yet. In Linux

fdisk -l

will list every partition of every disk in your box. That is a definitively information that never fails me. I would use either cfdisk or fdisk to get an "informed" opinion of your 2nd hard disk even if I do not re-partition it. For my money I would repartition the 2nd disk to the original scheme or any schem that I decide.

I learn my partitioning mainly through these two programs because you can see illegal actions being denied and any potential problem will be alerted.

Solaris has not touched your first disk and I don't think I would worry about it if the information shows up no error in cfdisk and fdisk. These are two different programs and both opinions count. The cfdisk will abandon your disk sooner if there are serious troubles but fdisk hangs on a little bit longer to enable you to use it. By the time both programs refuse to know your disk then it should be in a very serious state

Just last night I tried to install a distro and had no idea of its behaviour during installion. By the time I noticed it was formatting the 3rd partition I stopped the installation process. Then I realised the partition table of the 60 partitions has been destroyed. I re-build the 60 partitions with cfdisk. The accidentally formatted 3 areas covered only my 1Gb and so I assumed my first hda1 Dos partition has been hosed. The checking of the working hda2, hda9 and hda60 would suggest I have recovered 50 partitions back using the cfdisk program. Took 15 minutes ending up with a set of numb fingers hitting the same set of key sequences 60 times.

I do regards the cfdisk and fdisk of the Linux to be execellent tools and have succesfully used cfdisk to get over 200 partitions out of a hard disk, even though Linux only supports a maximum of 63 partition in an IDE disk (by hiding the extended partition after it is fully populated with logical partitions then proceed to create the next extended partition).

I just want to do test, I used Knoppix (Live CD V4.0.2) "cfdisk" utility to create 3 primary partitions on a 40 GB HD, there primary partitions are:

1- 15 GB NTFS

2- 5 GB FAT32

3- 20 GB NTFS

I did write (Knoppix option), and I restarted the PC.

When I booted the PC with XP CD (to install OS XP )..

XP did not recongnize the format of all there partitions,,,,Why?

I do not if it is related to knoppix, or XP CD ?

A system can only recognise a partition for data storage if

(1) It has been properly partitioned, as in your case

(2) It has been formatted. This is the bit you missed out!

Linux doesn't write on a NTFS partition and I am not sure if the captive NTFS of Knoppix can do it or not. I didn't find it reliable.

However if you format the second partition in Knoppix with "mkdosfs -F32" I expect XP to read it.

Does this make sense to you?

The way you did it I would say XP's disk management can see them but can't assign the drive letters until each partition has been formatted by XP.

Yes it is missing.


What will the case be if I create partitions "Type"
a- Solaris (BF)
b- Linux swap (83)
c- Linux ext3 (82)
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do I need to format them in order to be recognized by Solaris OS or Linux OS ?


Yes it does,,,I tried it before I posted my thread.

You indeed need to format, or better said newfs, these partitions for being able to mount them.

You do not state what you mean by "to be recognized by".

How can I format,,do you mean when linux offers me to format or by using Knoppix?

What I meant by this:

1- I created 3 partitions of "Type" (0C for NTFS, 70,,,I do not remember the right Hexadecimal number) by using "cfdisk" (Knoppix CD)utility.

2- I restarted PC by using XP CD (not Knoppix),,,XP CD was telling me that these partitions of type "unknown" .

A- my query is: if I created the same thing but different "Type" (i.e BF or 83 or 83 I do not remember the right Hexadecimal number),,,as you know these type for Solaris, Linux swap or Linux ext3.

B- If I restart PC by using Linux CD1 or Solaris CD1,,,do the same thing (unknown) as XP will happen to me ?

You seem to not understand the difference between subdivising the disk into areas (partitioning), and creating a structure able to hold files and directories (newfs, mkfs or equivalent depending on the O/S).

Having the right partition ID doesn't implies that partition is usable by an O/S.

(A) Type bf, 83 and 82 are for SOlaris, Linux and swap respectively

(B) The idea of having the partitions formed in advance is to have a firm idea of how the the different areas of the disk is to be used. The installer can then know about the choices and ask you to make the decision. The installers do known about the types.

XP will only recognise a "formatted" partition. The type isn't much of use to it. Type 7 is NTFS partition but adding a digit "1" in front, to become type 17, can make XP refuse to read its own partition. Indeed many non-MS operating systems are using this feature to play tunes with different MS systems on the box by hiding and unhiding its partitions for different purpose. You may see it as a confusion by it is a pretty good weapon for me to run 3 Dos and 4 Windows in the box.

My confusion was I was believing that choosing the option "write" availabe with 'cfdisk' utility will doing the job of format.


My answer will be above.

When you partition a hard disk you are altering the entries in the partition table and there are only 16 bytes to play around with per partition. The work content is nowhere near to say formatting a 20Gb of hard disk area by arranging booking keeping for all the blocks and clusters.