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

[Roger Heflin]

Nigel Henry wrote:
> 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
> 
> 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 /.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions.
> 
> Nigel.
> 


It is not a SATA thing.

You only get 4 primary partitions, usually the last of the primaries is an 
extended partition containing *all* of the rest of the space, if the last 
partition does not contain all of the rest of the space, well, you cannot use it 
without repartitioning.

There does not seem to be a limit on the number of the partitions in an extended 
partition, but there could be limits in some of the tools to deal with things.

There is a limit of the total number of partitions that a single disk can have 
and I think that was 16 so your aren't quite there yet.

I would suggest not creating /home for each installation (just for the first 
one) and then changing fstab to mount a shared home, the only steps that would 
need to be done to properly do this would be to make sure the UID/users on all 
distributions are the same, and make sure fstab on each distribution has it 
added as an entry.

                                Roger