[SlugBug] partitions and partitioning and some swearing

[Mike Dewar]

Ok,

The situation is: the Linux fever is overtaking my office. So the two guys I 
convinced to hop aboard and install SUSE this morning convinced another 
person in my office to install it as well. 

Their plan was to dual boot the machine with WinXP and SUSE 9.1. They clicked 
accept blindly though the install process and were surprise when it turned 
out that the partition table was somewhat messy when they finished. 

Now we have a partition table that has hda1 to hda8 where hda1 is the win 
partition, hda2 is extended, hda 3 and 4 are little FAT32 partitions, 
hda4-hda8 are linux-y things like root, swap and god knows what. 

After they found this out they looked confused and came to ask me as though I 
would know what to do; the problem being that I don't have a clue... We would 
like to merge the two little FAT32 partions and generally mess about. However 
when using the partioning tool in SUSE which i believe is called parted it 
says something along the lines of: 
	'I can't resize or delete these partitions, sorry about that. If you were 
cleverer you might be able to fix this but you're not so don't try else I 
will break everything'

Partition magic in WinXP also gives an error, saying something like:
	'Run ! Run ! Something's fucked but I can't tell what and it hurts oh it 
hurts! Backup! Delete! Reinstall! Run! Run!'

...which I thought was a little heavy on the histrionics but what can you do 
with these windows programs? 

So I thought that I might not be clever enough but that one of you lot might 
be. Any ideas? My guesses have been on the lines of maybe the partition 
table's broken? But I don't know quite what this means, never mind what to do 
about it...

Cheers in advance,

Mike Dewar