how not to initialize HD

[Tom H]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 2:52 PM, JB <jb.123abc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Tom H <tomh0665 <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 2:25 PM, JB <jb.123abc <at> yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > JB <jb.123abc <at> yahoo.com> writes:
>> >
>> > # fdisk -l
>> > ...
>> >   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>> > /dev/sda1   *           1        4462    35840983+   7  HPFS/NTFS
>> > /dev/sda2            4463        4717     2048287+   e  W95 FAT16 (LBA)
>> > /dev/sda3            4718       12162    59793409    5  Extended
>> > Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
>> > /dev/sda5            4718        5961     9989120   83  Linux
>> > /dev/sda6            5962        8094    17133291   83  Linux
>> > /dev/sda7           11919       12162     1951744   82  Linux swap/Solaris
>> > /dev/sda8            8095       11918    30716248+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
>> >
>> sda3 can be an extended partition.
>
> Tom,
> I was not sure about it ... I thought that might confuse the partition table
> layout logic. I wanted to make it "by the book" as much as possible.
> OK. Let's assume that your are right. That would not necessitate touching
> sda2 with W95 FAT16.
>
> Paul, you are following the thread, are you :-) .
>
> Tom,
> now there is a problem with Extended partition ending on 12162 boundary, which
> is end of sda7, and not sda8 as it should be.
> What do you think can we do to fold sda8 into that Extended partition without
> remaking the Extended partition entirely ?
> Perhaps we can fool it (or it is the right thing to do ...) by saving sda8
> (W95 FAT32) contents somewhere (like I suggested previously for sda2) and
> delete sda8. Would that fix the table (at least so it would become workable).
> After that we could try a trick again by incorporating that free space into
> sda7 so that allignments would be correct once again.
> What do you think ?

As a concrete example, Debian (and therefore Ubuntu), in its default
set up, mounts / on sda1 and swap on sda5 (with sda2 as an extended
partition) so having sda3 rather than sda4 as an extended partition
isn't a problem.

The sda7/sda8 situation is strange but I have seen it before and don't
think that it is a problem. I would want to change it because I would
rather have an fdisk output that looks more "normal"/"logical" but it
wouldn't be a technical decision.

The problem might be that there is no free space but the installed
must have some kind of warning for that (surely!).