Partitioning an SSD Drive

I'm a wee bit puzzled as to the way the Acer uses the flash memory shown as a single SSD drive.

Would I be able to partition the drive if I wanted to run Linux as well as XP.

Geffers

 

This is not a section of forum for such question. Move yours post to Linux section. There is number of boot loaders such as grub that will solve yours problem.

 

I thought it was actually, I am asking about an SSD drive and not how to partition and boot.

I know how to partition and boot conventional drives but am unsure as to what happens if the drive, seen as one drive by the Acer but is actually two drives, is patitioned.

As an example, the Acer sees an 8GB SD and the onboard 8GB NAND as one 16GB HD, so if I partition for one 10GB and one 8GB where is the partition table loaded; then I assume the SD card can never be removed as it either contains the partition table or is referred to by the table.

Geffers

 

Check out http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/09/abou ... spire.html .

 

Thanks, an interesting article.

I think it has swayed me away from an Acer SSD as it appears to add an extra layer of potential problem.

Geffers

 

Hi,

I used Gparted to partition the SSD drive, worked fine. But it does only partition the SSD itself (8GB) and does not see the 'combined' 16 GB Thunar sees if you have a 8 GB SD card in the storage expansion slot. So, if you leave 4 GB on the SSD for Linpus after partioning, it will add the SD to a total of 12 GB. You won't be able to create to even partitions of 8 GB each. Furthermore, not all programms handle the storage expansion well. Eventually, I installed a 1.8" HD in my AA1 in order to have room for a dual boot system (Linpus/Ubuntu).

 

viva, can you detail the config/command you used for gparted. I tried qtparted on my 16gb SSD, and it fails every time, telling me run e2fsck. When I run e2fsck it finds huge numbers (100,000) of linked inodes, which it tries to fix. Then qtparted still fails.

Thanks

 

Hi,

you can't partition the drive you booted from. I had a Ubuntu Live CD on a USB stick to boot from and ran the GParted app from there. No terminal required

 

viva, sorry, thought gparted was CLI. I'm used to qtparted (I'm a KDE guy).

I used a knoppix usb to try this. Made sure the devices were offline (no mounts and all swap disabled). Still errors. Might try a different usb distro instead.

 

Hi pixel,

I chose Ubuntu because GParted is installed on their Live CD and I had problems to run PartedMagic off a USB-key. If I dare to ask: did you run fsck before? You can also initiate a check & repair from the GParted app. I experienced that it repaired errors that stopped fsck in the terminal. Basically, it calls also fsck, but with a bunch of options that seem to work quite well.

BTW, I'm a Mac guy and therefore I prefer GUIs over a CLI. But my Linux AA1 made me knowing the terminal quite well, that's something useful for OS X, too.

 

Viva,

I ran qtparted - it failed telling me to run e2fsck, which I dutifully did. Then qtparted failed again. Interestingly, after running e2fsck a few times, and fixing all the multiple inodes, the used spaces jumped from 2gb to 6gb.

I'll try with an ubuntu usb (I don't have an external CD), and gparted.

If I get this working I want to put Fedora 10 with XFCE on. I'm a long-time Red Hat user, so accustomed to their "customisations"; all other distros confuse me :?

Does your 8gb SSD have a recovery partition on it? I have a partition of just over 1gb, and an entry in grub for it. I've used this once already as a test and it seems to do the same as the DVD.

 

No. It cuts one GB for the swap partition, the rest goes to Linpus. On the other hand, when I installed Linpus on my 60 GB HD, it created a recovery partition with 1.3 GB - that would obviously be too much to cut from a 8 GB SSD.

Greetings, viva

 

Well, for some reason gparted worked perfectly, but qtparted failed every time. Anyway, I now have a very functional Fedora 10 with XFCE running on my AA1. And Linpus is still there for the missus. Thanks for the help Viva.