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

Nigel Henry cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr
Thu Jul 31 18:54:19 UTC 2008


On Thursday 31 July 2008 19:51, Anders Karlsson wrote:
> * Nigel Henry <cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr> [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.




More information about the fedora-list mailing list