Win95 Ext Partition on redhat servers

[XuanCris]

Hi;

 

I'm a rank beginner, and I just notice that all our Poweredge servers, which came with RedHat installed, have these huge Win95 partitions on the disk, that appear to be doing nothing.

 

- Is there a purpose to these partitions? Are they something that is used somewhere, or should they be removed?

- If they're supposed to do somethign, what is it, and how do I do it?

- If they don't do anything, is there an easier way than simpy repartitining the disk & startign from scratch?

- Is reiserfs as good as it sounds? (tangentially related, but I thought I'd sneak that one in...)

 

Thanks!

 

p.s. - here's the typical output of fdisk -p on these servers:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 1 8 64228+ de Dell Utility

/dev/sda2 9 432 3405780 83 Linux

/dev/sda3 * 433 457 200812+ 83 Linux

/dev/sda4 458 17834 139580752+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sda5 458 1731 10233373+ 83 Linux

/dev/sda6 1732 3005 10233373+ 83 Linux

/dev/sda7 3006 3266 2096451 83 Linux

/dev/sda8 3267 3397 1052226 83 Linux

/dev/sda9 3398 3651 2040223+ 82 Linux swap

[hijinks]

the Dell Utility is the dell partition.. its around 64 megs in size and it holds some dell utilities to like auto install RHEL and other random stuff like that..

 

like for example if you have a PERC raid controller in the machine it will not only install RHEL but also install the correct rpms to monitor that PERC card from inside linux. So its just a partition that holds some tools..

 

that win95 Ext'd is just the start of your extended partitions.. a drive can only have 4 primary partitions and i have no clue how many extended.. so ou create that win95 ext'd partition that basically contains all your other extended partitions past sda4

[XuanCris]

Aha - thank you. So the space "inside" the extended win95 partition is actually availabel for additional partitions? - That might work just fine, then.

 

the Dell Utility is the dell partition.. its around 64 megs in size and it holds some dell utilities to like auto install RHEL and other random stuff like that.. 

like for example if you have a PERC raid controller in the machine it will not only install RHEL but also install the correct rpms to monitor that PERC card from inside linux. So its just a partition that holds some tools..

 

that win95 Ext'd is just the start of your extended partitions.. a drive can only have 4 primary partitions and i have no clue how many extended.. so ou create that win95 ext'd partition that basically contains all your other extended partitions past sda4

[anyweb]

the Dell Utility is the dell partition.. its around 64 megs in size and it holds some dell utilities to like auto install RHEL and other random stuff like that..

 

i was under the impression that that utility was for hardware diagnostics

 

press F12 at boot time and choose 'dell diags...'

 

that boots to the dell 'utility parition' which contains the 30-64mb of stuff

 

i have no idea if things are different on the server side of things, but for desktop/notebook, the DUP is for diags only.

 

cheers

anyweb