Partition problem

[Mario Vukelic]

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 14:48 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1   *           1         974     7823623+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda2             975        1948     7823655   83  Linux
> /dev/sda3            1949        2192     1959930   82  Linux swap / Solaris
> /dev/sda4            2193        5598    27358695    5  Extended
> /dev/sda5            2193        4625    19543041   83  Linux
> /dev/sda6            4626        5598     7815591   83  Linux

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 15:11 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:
> /dev/sda6 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
> /dev/sda5 on /home type ext3 (rw)

>     It does not tell me much.

I know. It does tell me a few things, though.

For one, it tells me that /dev/sda4, which is an extended partition
according to your fstab output, contains /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda6 as
logical partitions. This was maybe done by Ubuntu or by yourself at
installation time, because the PC spec allows only 4 partitions per
disk. You probably already had /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda3 is
swap. So, to create both / and /home partitions, an extended partition
had to be used as the 4th partition. Extended partitions can in turn
contain several logical partitions. It's just a braindeadness of the PC
spec.

It also tells me that /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda5 are mounted as /
and /home, respectively. 

I don't believe that your OS changed these partitions (or any partitions
for that matter) all by itself. I cannot imagine why or how it would do
that.


What do you use /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 for, anyway?

At this point I'd rather not go into whether there are ways to
"change[ing] something that lets [you] use the whole hard drive without
deleting sda5 and sda6"