Re: No space for new partition on SATA drive, but 61GBfreespace

On Thursday 31 July 2008 19:51, Anders Karlsson wrote: > * Nigel Henry <cave.dnb2m97pp(a)aliceadsl.fr&gt; [20080731 19:24]: >> This is the first time that I've used SATA harddrives on this new machine >> that I've built, so am a bit in the dark. >> >> Fedora 8 is using sda1 for / , and sda2 for /home. sda3 is swap >> >> sda4 (the 4th primary is the extended partition) >> >> sda5, and 6, are / , and /home for another linux distro >> sda7, and 8, are / , and /home for another linux distro >> sda9, and 10, are / , and /home for yet another linux distro >> sda11, and 12, are / , and /home for another linux distro > So you have used up all four primary partitions available, making the > fourth the container for extended partitions. You've then proceeded to > allocate most of your 15 possible partitions. > >> There is still showing 61020 MB of free space on the drive, but trying to >> create a new partition for the install of Fedora 9, with 10000MB for / I >> get the following output. Written in freehand. >> >> Error Partitioning >> >> ould not allocate requested partitions: Partitioning failed: Could not >> allocate partitions as primary partitions. Not enough space left to >> create partition for /. > Yeah, you're trying to create it as a primary partition, but you > already have used up all those slots. Actually this is a bit strange, because the Fedora 9 partitioning tool when you want to create a new partition from freespace, doesn't give options for primary, or logical partitions. All there was was a checkbox which said "force as primary partition", which obviously I didn't check, because I knew that all primaries were used up. >> I'm sure I've seen some stuff about partition limits on SATA drives, but >> can't remember where. If there are limits, are there any workarounds so >> that I can use this 61+GB of freespace. > man fdisk I'll have a look at that again, because logically there still should be 3 useable logical partitions within the extended partition, which would enable me to use this 16GB of freespace.

> It'll tell you most of what you need to know. > >> Thanks for any suggestions. > Create the partition as an extended partition, instead of primary > partition. > > HTH, > > /Anders Temporarily, I've installed Fedora 9 on the other drive which I wanted to keep just for data Thanks for the reply, and suggestions. Nigel.