Just formatted again...need to sort out hard drive

[Greg A]

I've just reinstalled Fedora 8 and made a slight alteration to the default partition layout...I added another partition of 70Gb at /home but I can see no way to get to it. This is where I want to put stuff I don't want to lose if (when) I re-format again. I've posted a couple of attachments that show what how it's partitioned and what's on it, and what I can see from my desktop and the output I get from /sbin/fdisk -1 is as follows:

[root@owp144b greg]# /sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7ed9269a

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          25      200781   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              26        8949    71682030   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            8950       14593    45335430   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 44.7 GB, 44761612288 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5441 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 1610 MB, 1610612736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 195 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x30307800

Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
[root@owp144b greg]#

I haven't installed any updates yet until I get this sorted (I may need to re-install again )
Can anyone help me to get my /home drive accessable?

[markkuk]

The gparted screen shows /dev/sda2 is mounted as /home just as you intended and 2GB of it is already used. What's the output of "df -h" and "cat /proc/mounts"? What makes you think that your /home isn't accessible?

[Greg A]

I was operating under the assumption that the /home drive would be such that by default, normal files wouldn't be saved into it, ie: it would be a completely separate drive to the one that is used as standard (the standard one being dev/sda3)...Given that gparted doesn't know the file system of dev/sda3 is or what is on it I'm now lead to believe that everything gets flung onto the /home directory anyway which isn't what I wanted...Though I could be wrong! (highly likely)
What I'm after is a place on my hard-drive where I can safely put any data into it that s isolated from the normal day to day operations of linux such that if I need to re-install again after I trying to *fix* things I don't lose this data...also I want it available to other distros at a later date.

The output from them 2 commands is:

[root@owp144b greg]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                       41G  3.0G   36G   8% /
/dev/sda2              67G  190M   63G   1% /home
/dev/sda1             190M   13M  169M   7% /boot
tmpfs                 378M   12K  378M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sr0              3.2G  3.2G     0 100% /media/Fedora 8 i386 DVD
[root@owp144b greg]# cat /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
/dev/root / ext3 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
/dev /dev tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0
/proc /proc proc rw,relatime 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs rw,relatime 0 0
none /selinux selinuxfs rw,relatime 0 0
/proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,relatime 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,relatime 0 0
/dev/sda2 /home ext3 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,relatime 0 0
sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw,relatime 0 0
/etc/auto.misc /misc autofs rw,relatime,fd=6,pgrp=2132,timeout=300,minproto=5,maxproto=5,indirect 0 0
-hosts /net autofs rw,relatime,fd=11,pgrp=2132,timeout=300,minproto=5,maxproto=5,indirect 0 0
/dev/sr0 /media/Fedora\0408\040i386\040DVD iso9660 ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime 0 0
[root@owp144b greg]#

[Magnar]

Seems to me that everything works, but that you didn't set it
up exactly as you had imagined. The way it is now, files you
store under /home will be on the 60GB-partition, but this does
not sound like what you had in mind, since /home is where you
would generally have all your data. That is, /home is the standard
directory for day-to-day operation.

The way it is set up now, your programs will probably wind up
on the main partition, while your home directory is on the separate
partition. If I understood your intentions correctly, you probably want
/home on the main partition, while you want this separate partition
to mount somewhere else (like /mnt/sparepartition) so that this
partition would stay clean until one day when you wanted to
re-install your system.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, anyone.

EDIT: Are you used to Windows? Cause in Windows separate partitions
have separate drive icons. In Linux, the different partitions and drives
are mounted so that they just look like regular directories, which could
be confusing from a Windows point of view.

[Greg A]

Very used to windows ...but being too heavy handed and killing vista 3 weeks ago when installing ubuntu without checking that the only cd that came with my laptop is an upgrade cd...I'm forced to try and work with linux (but I don't like vista anyway) and know practically nothing!

I think what you said is almost right, but the spare partition is where I want important data to be held whilst the main partitiion is the one where linux and myself do day to day stuff...It seems I have mixed up the conventions used and thought /home was what people refer to as a spare partition...which is what I want!
I'm getting used to reformatting but soon I'm going to be creating documents and files I really don't want to lose. Having a drive that I would never format (containing all my data) when reinstalling linux in the future is what I'm after. Also that this drive could be mounted with other distros once I know what I'm doing.

[jrummy27]

Your /home directory is used to store the individual user directories containing their personal settings, files, etc. This is separate from the OS's programs, configuration files, libraries, etc which are being stored in a logical volume in the volume group residing on /dev/sda3. You can view your logical volumes with 'lvdisplay'. GParted doesn't undestand LVM, so it doesn't know what is on /dev/sda3.

What I'm after is a place on my hard-drive where I can safely put any data into it that s isolated from the normal day to day operations of linux such that if I need to re-install again after I trying to *fix* things I don't lose this data...also I want it available to other distros at a later date.

It sounds like you've accomplished this. I use a separate partition for my home directory so that if I have to reinstall, my personal settings and files are still intact. If thats not what you want, you can change /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sda2 somewhere else, like /data

[Greg A]

Having my personal settings and files still intact after future installs is precisely what I want What is throwing me though is that if I hadn't have made another partition /home (and on practically all occasions when reinstalling I haven't) then from the two partitions that fedora makes by default (one being boot) I'd expect everything to go into the logical volume such that another drive I added is something I'd actually have to physically find. But if everything is ok and again its just incompetence on my part thats letting me down I'll be happy to call this one resolved