Disk question

Tom Dunne

Yet again, I find myself completely out of my depth in Linux.

Quick overview: our ICT team have zero knowledge of Linux and the support contractor has had his contract terminated for reasons unknown. I have to install Oracle on a Red Hat system and I am pretty much on my own.

I have a disk, dev/sda which is 64Gb. 40Gb of that is on an unformatted partition (as in, only 20Gb is visible and in use), so I need to get that 40Gb partition formatted, visible and available so I can install Oracle.

When I go into the LVM gui, the 40Gb unpartitioned space shows up, but the button for "initialise entity" is greyed out, see the image below (I should point out that this is an image from the web, not my own configuration):



So, I am wondering what I have to do to get this partition visible, so I can start using it. I will probably mount it under a new mount point, /u01, so I won't be adding the space to one that is there already.

And no, I am not afraid of the command line.

croo

LVM allows you to create a Logical Volume (read Disk) from 1 or more disks.
But to partition this try using GParted to create and format the unused space on the logical volume.

Tom Dunne

Gparted isn't installed. Red Hat Enterprise tends to be very behind the times with stuff like this. Am I correct in assuming I can add a partition using fdisk?

I have the following config:

Disk /dev/sda: 64.4 GB, 64424509440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7832 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 2563 20482875 8e Linux LVM

When I go to add a partition using fdisk, it suggests starting at 2564:

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 3
First cylinder (2564-7832, default 2564):
Using default value 2564
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (2564-7832, default 7832):

am I correct in assuming this is what I want?

Tom Dunne

Just tried it, all working fine now. I have a brand new 20GB partition under /u01 and another 20Gb spare.

It wasn't that difficult after all.