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Old 28th February 2009
fbsduser fbsduser is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2008
Posts: 110
Default Moving linux partitions out of the BSD disklabel/slice

Hi. Sorry for being away but my Toshiba laptop passed away due to a nasty power surge while it was hooked on the AC. Luckily yesterday a rich kid a few houses below my block dumped a perfectly new and functional Acer laptop because "it was getting slow (read: windoze rot)" and I took it and decided to install NetBSD 4.0 (I have a mini-cd with it) along with Ubuntu Ultimate 2.0 (I also have it's LiveDVD, didn't chose sabayon because it's disc was in the toshiba's drive when the "incident" happened and the disc was unrecoverably damaged as well) in a dualboot setup, but after installing NetBSD (easy stuff) I realized that the partitioner that comes in the Ubuntu Ultimate installer (and gparted too) cannot notice the BSD partition (my HD is currently laid out in this way)
as seen in linux cfdisk:
Code:
                           cfdisk (util-linux-ng 2.14)

                              Disk Drive: /dev/sda
                       Size: 120034123776 bytes, 120.0 GB
             Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 14593

    Name        Flags      Part Type  FS Type          [Label]         Size (MB)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    sda1        Boot        Primary   NetBSD                             12000.69
    sda2                       Primary   NTFS                                 85929.51
    sda5        NC          Logical   Linux ext3      [Almacenaje]   20003.89
                                 Logical   Free Space                                  0.04*
    sda4                      Primary   Linux swap / Solaris               2097.42*





     [ Bootable ]  [  Delete  ]  [   Help   ]  [ Maximize ]  [  Print  ]
     [   Quit   ]  [   Type   ]  [  Units   ]  [  Write   ]
as seen in linux fdisk
Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1459    11719386   a9  NetBSD
/dev/sda2            1460       11906    83915527+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           11907       14593    21583327+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4           14339       14593     2048256   82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda5           11907       14338    19534977   83  Linux
and as seen in NetBSD fdisk
Code:
Disk: /dev/rwd0d
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 232581, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 234441648

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1023, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 234441648

Partition table:
0: NetBSD (sysid 169)
    start 63, size 23438772 (11445 MB, Cyls 0-1458), Active
1: NTFS, OS/2 HPFS, QNX2 or Advanced UNIX (sysid 7)
    start 23438835, size 167831055 (81949 MB, Cyls 1459-11905)
2: Ext. partition - LBA (sysid 15)
    start 191269890, size 43166655 (21077 MB, Cyls 11906-14592)
3: Linux swap or Prime or Solaris (sysid 130)
    start 230340033, size 4096512 (2000 MB, Cyls 14338/1/1-14592)
        PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
Extended partition table:
E0: Linux native (sysid 131)
    start 191270016, size 39069954 (19077 MB, Cyls 11906/2/1-14337)
        PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
what I want to do is make the partition table become visible to gparted and the installer's partition manager without having to lose the contents of the sda5 partition, so that I can install Ubuntu without losing the files in that partition and without removing the already installed NetBSD. The question would be then. Is it possible to somehow resize the BSD slice and move sda2, sda3, sda4 and sda5 out of the BSD slice or make Ubuntu recognize the BSD style disklabel and install on sda2 (that partition will become the Ubuntu's "/" one)? If there is a way, how (with which tool/under which OS)? or if it's imposible and using an external HD (to save the contents of sda5) is the only way out, how do I install NetBSD so that Ubuntu will be installable after installing NetBSD?
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