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Topic: Trouble deleting partition part of a logical partition, how to proceed

I  have a 500 GB hard disk set up for dual-booting with Windows XP and Fedora Core 6 with the following partitions:
   /dev/sda1  fat16
   /dev/sda2  ntfs
   /dev/sda3  extended
     /dev/sda5 ntfs
     /dev/sda6 fat32
     /dev/sda7  ext3
     /dev/sda8  unknown
  /dev/sda4  fat32

I would like to delete the /dev/sda6 fat32 partition and then extend the /dev/sda5 ntfs partition to use the freed up space. So I tried first to delete the /dev/sda6 fat 32 partition but gparted gave this error message:

      Unable to delete /dev/sda6 
      Please unmount any logical partitions having a number higher than 6

I don't understand how to respond to this message, could someone please explain what to do?

   Thanks,

   Henry

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Re: Trouble deleting partition part of a logical partition, how to proceed

Yrs the problem is quite easy. Listen : since you are running a system, it uses partitions set in /etc/fstab. It is likely your fstab tells the system to auto-mount your /dev/sda6 somewhere. Then the system returns you that it can't delete partition currently in use. OK ?
So to delete this partition you first need to umount it ; then it is free to be deleted.
Take care that after you delete this partition, sda7 will become sda6, sda8/sda7 and so on.
It won't affect FC6, since it works with label (grub and fstab look for partition with a label and not with a number).

So, i*in your case*, it won't affect your working system, since you did no change to the default configuration.
If you are not sure of what you did, just post here the output of those two files :
/etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: Trouble deleting partition part of a logical partition, how to proceed

>So to delete this partition you first need to umount it ; then it is free to be deleted.
>Take care that after you delete this partition, sda7 will become sda6, sda8/sda7 and so on.
>t won't affect FC6, since it works with label (grub and fstab look for partition with a label and not with >a number).

Thanks for your reply.

Your suggested answer makes sense, but it is not what I would have concluded based on the error message

     please unmount any logical partitions having a number higher than 6

you are recommending that I unmount /dev/sda6 directly.

I also am not sure about the rest of your reply, are you saying that I will have to renumber the higher number partitions /dev/sda7 and /dev/sda8, after unmounting and deleting /dev/sda6? I am not running gparted at the moment, is renumbering straightforward and safe to do within gparted?

Thanks again.

   Henry

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Re: Trouble deleting partition part of a logical partition, how to proceed

hsg7 wrote:

>So to delete this partition you first need to umount it ; then it is free to be deleted.
>Take care that after you delete this partition, sda7 will become sda6, sda8/sda7 and so on.
>t won't affect FC6, since it works with label (grub and fstab look for partition with a label and not with >a number).

Thanks for your reply.

Your suggested answer makes sense, but it is not what I would have concluded based on the error message

     please unmount any logical partitions having a number higher than 6

you are recommending that I unmount /dev/sda6 directly.

I also am not sure about the rest of your reply, are you saying that I will have to renumber the higher number partitions /dev/sda7 and /dev/sda8, after unmounting and deleting /dev/sda6? I am not running gparted at the moment, is renumbering straightforward and safe to do within gparted?

Thanks again.

   Henry

I need to see your fstab to give you answer that make sens, please.

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: Trouble deleting partition part of a logical partition, how to proceed

Larry,

Thanks for your time and help in responding to these postings.

My fstab file is the following:

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /                       ext3    defaults       1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/sda2               /winxp                  ntfs-3g  user,ro        0 0
/dev/sda5               /ntfs-data              ntfs-3g  user,rw        0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap                    swap    defaults       0 0

while the output from fdisk -l is

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           6       48163+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2   *           7       19167   153910732+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           19168       60347   330778350    5  Extended
/dev/sda4           60348       60801     3646755   db  CP/M / CTOS / ...
/dev/sda5           19168       47217   225311593+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6           47218       47230      104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           47231       60347   105362271   8e  Linux LVM

I originally tried to delete a vfat partition and extend an adjacent ntfs partition using Partition Magic 8.0 (I didn't know about gparted at that point) but Partition Magic failed midway, leaving my system in an unstable state, e.g., grub can no longer boot into Linux. Running fdisk -l via the FC6 rescue disk shows that all the partitions are still present and mountable, so I guess it is fstab that is screwed up (I took out the line that mounted the fat partition since I thought this was deleted).

Your suggestions about how to complete what I started---extend the /dev/sda5 ntfs partition and recover grub---would be appreciated.

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Re: Trouble deleting partition part of a logical partition, how to proceed

An add on to my previous post: when grub tries to boot, it gives the following error message:

root(hd0,6)
filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
kernel /vmlinux-2.6.19-1.2911.6.5.fc6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgh quiet
Error 17: cannot mount selected partition.

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Re: Trouble deleting partition part of a logical partition, how to proceed

Well the problem is quite clear : GParted doesn't support LVM atm sad
So you can't do anything.
But afaik there is a built-in tool to manage LV in FC6...

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)