Hi everyone. Anyone ready to help a poor innocent newbie would be much appreciated. I have two questions that have been driving me crazy for a while: Question 1: I installed Mandrake version 8.1 a while back on my new PC (AMD 1.6 with 668 DDR Ram). I had a few problems with this (mainly I have to admit because of my lack of experience and rushing in too quickly). I have two hard drives on my machine and when I installed Mandrake I did not realise that it was a good idea to create all the partitions first when doing a dual boot with Windows. So I let Mandrake create and format a partition on my second drive. Some time later I uninstalled Mandrake by going in and deleting these partitions ....... Ever since, my second drive which is 40 GB in size will only show 31GB. The former Linux part of this disk is missing and it does not show up AT ALL in any tool, FDISK not HardDrake disk tools. IS there some way I can recover this space? It is really driving me nuts? Question 2: Having learnt a great deal , mainly from helpful people like yourselves on forums like these, I have now reinstalled Linux on my machine as a dual boot with Win XP. I've successfully resolved many of the issues that drove me away last time. The problem I have remaining is that now when I try to install programs in my home directory I don't have enough space. Linux created three partitions during install. Swap, mnt and usr but it seems to have given 98% of the 8 G I allocated to the /usr partition. When I try to istall down there it tells me "Access Denied". I have tried the following: - Changing permissions down in /usr so my user has permission - NO JOY - Using Hard Drake tools on the disk - but it gives me no option to resize any of my partitions (probably because all the space on this disk is allocated - aprt from my missing 8GB, see above, which doesn't show up at all). Am I going to have to do a reinstall in order to reset these partition sizes? Help always much appreciated. Thanks in advance

Your first problem sounds really strange, try using cfdisk for the drive, if it doesn't see the space, I can't help you. As for the second problem, you could just move the home directories to /usr, i.e.: mv /home /usr ln -s /usr/home /home Of course if cfdisk works you could just create a new partition for /home.