StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Apparently its all a big secret. The drives involved aren't boot, aren't system, and don't contain anything but data. All I want to do is remove the present partitions and setup an LVG. If I have to reinstall, thats stupid.

I've found reference to commandline stuff I could use, but I haven't turned up what they ARE. So help a poor n00b who sure as hell isn't reinstalling just to edit the damn partition table.

EDIT - so commandline stuff can't do LVM and disk druid wants to kill my boot part if do a commando reinstall. My system is on a pair of SCSI disks, and I'm messing with a pair of IDEs, but neh...

EDIT2 - I ran a reinstall without packages and leaving the system parts intact. Now I get access denied on all the RL5 boot actions. Great.

Depends on your filesystem type. If it's ReiserFS/Ext[23] then resizing partitions is possible. You'll need parted and fdisk, plus whatever tools are needed for configuring LVM.

Here is an LVM howto:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/upg ... tolvm.html

Erm, command line stuff can do LVM... I don't use Mandrake, can't help you w/ GUI tools (and haven't used LVM, since I just dump everything on one partition- my understanding is that you make your base partitions as small as possible, then create new partitions on the fly to expand them as needed- fiddled around with it while installing Debian, and figured it wasn't worth the performance overhead).

And what's RL5? A boot loader?

I broke boot somehow: it never gets past runlevel five, and doesn't boot. Bah. I decided commandline wouldn't work when parted had a very narrow choice of options. Why the fuck FC3 doesn't just have an easy way to change it I don't know.

So is there an easy way to fix a permissions problem on boot or should I just boot in rescue mode, grab my configurations and reinstall?

Boot into single user mode and change the permissions? This ought to work, if all you mean by permission problem is some file with the wrong filesystem permissions causing one of the rc scripts to fail.

I a) don't know what exactly I don't have access to (its boot, so who needs access to it?) and b) I'm not sure how extensive it is.