Parted Not Found

[JP Jamous]

Thank you. I will definitely try those. 

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of trev.saunders at gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 9:33 AM
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
Subject: Re: Parted Not Found

Hi,

> You are correct. I typed help after accessing parted, but the help is 
> more of a reminder. An Admin must know how the arguments work correctly.
> 
> I cannot seem to find a good tutorial on how to use parted or fdisk. I 
> would like to learn the switches and what the various commands mean 
> such as commas, slashes, etc.

you don't need to give commands arguments, if you don't give them, parted or
fdisk will ask the questions one at a time like the following example.

you type resize.
parted replies what partition would you like to resize you enter 1 parted
asks you how big you want make partition 1 be, and you say 40G parted
resizes the partition, and asks what you'd like to do next.
This is a rough sketch, its been a month or so since I needed to partition a
disk.  I remember them being fairly self explanatory so long as you let it
ask the questions instead of supplying arguments, but if you want a
explanation, the gentoo handbook at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml has a decent description
of how to use fdisk in chapter 5.

> 
> My current problem is that I have an 80GB hard drive. I installed XP 
> Pro SP3 on it using a primary NTFS. Now, I want to resize that to make 
> room for the ArchLinux installation. Resize seems my best bet, but it 
> has so many arguments that must be entered correctly. I know I am 
> diving too deep for a beginner, but I am only a beginner in Linux. I 
> know the rest very well from administering Windows for the last 12 years.

Ok, I take it you didn't use the windows installer to set up partitions with
a spare partition for linux?  Unfortunitely, that would have been slightly
simpler, because ntfs support in linux isn't the simplest thing.

What I believe you'll have to do is use ntfsresize to resize the ntfs
filesystem that windows uses, then use parted to shrink the partition that
the ntfs filesystem was on, and make file system's on the new partitions for
linux.

This will look something like the following:
1. #ntfsresize --size <new size>G /dev/sda1 # note that <new size>G is the
number of gigabytes you want the file system to be, where a gigabyte is
10^9, not 2^30 I would probably use about 40G for windows, maby 50 or 60
depending on my exact needs, in that case you would do ntfsresize --size 40G
/dev/sda1 if windows is on the first partition of the first harddrive.
then use parted to resize that partition to 40G, and create new partitions
for linux.

HTH
Trev
> 
> Any good tutorials or articles would be great. Bare with me folks. I 
> will catch up very quickly. Thank you.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: trev.saunders at gmail.com [mailto:trev.saunders at gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 7:12 AM
> To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.; JP Jamous
> Subject: Re: Parted Not Found
> 
> Hi,
> 
> yes, speakup is part of the kernel, but parted etc are just normal 
> executables.
> wrt your original problem you seem to have been missing the space 
> between the name of the program (parted) and the argument, (/dev/sda 
> the drive you wanted to partition).
> 
> HTH
> Trev
> 
_______________________________________________
Speakup mailing list
Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup