Shoutbox

Firstly let me explain my hard drive. It has 4 partitions, all set up when I bought my laptop. One contains Windows, another (DATA) contains Documents, Videos etc., one has Acer InstantOn Arcade and the 4th is called PQSERVICE and I don't know what it does!

I used gParted to resize the DATA partition from 140GB to 120GB, to free up 20GB for Linux. (Incidentally, this took ages, much longer than when I used a Windows program, I think PartitionMagic, on my old computer - are there any other free tools that anyone can recommend?).

Booting the Fedora install DVD worked fine until it came to the point of partitioning. Ths option of "use free space" returned an error saying that there wasn't enough free space. Manually trying to allocate space showed the 4 partitions outlined earlier plus one ~20GB area and a 6MB area, both labelled "free space". Trying to create any partitions in the larger of these returned the same error message. t this point I gave up on Fedora and tried Ubuntu, which I have installed on other computers numerous times.

On Ubuntu, the partitioning stage was a bit different. The "free space" was labeled "unusable"!

Does anyone know what I have done wrong , or how to solve it? I'm guessing it's a problem with how I used gParted, but everything I did seemed to make sense!

Any help would be hugely appreciated - I dn't want to be stuck with just one OS!

Robert

You can only have 4 primary partitions on a hard drive at one time.

You'll need to convert your data partition to Logical / Extended, and then also create the Linux parititons (you will need a root filesystem and swap space) inside this Logical Partition.

gParted will have taken a long time to resize the partition because it likely had to move data from the end of the partition in to the new boundaries.

Thanks so much for your help. Just to ckeck before I do anything stupid: I extend the DATA partition (there's not much on it atm, so it's probably the best) to fill all space, then convert it to "Logical / Extended" and create the new logical partitions in that? Will this make the DATA partition appear any differently in Windows?

Thanks once again

Robert

quote:

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Originally posted by rob_botch
Thanks so much for your help. Just to ckeck before I do anything stupid: I extend the DATA partition (there's not much on it atm, so it's probably the best) to fill all space, then convert it to "Logical / Extended" and create the new logical partitions in that? Will this make the DATA partition appear any differently in Windows?

Thanks once again

Robert

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Not quite. First you convert the data partition to Logical, and then try and create another partition. In all likelihood the program will be smart enough to resize the extended partition to fit around this new partition.

You can't convert a primary partition into a logical one. You will have to make a backup of the DATA volume, delete it, then create the logical partition to host the new DATA and the Linux volumes.

Another problem you may encounter, is that many BIOS's cannot boot from volumes after a certain cylinder number, I had the same problem. To overcome this, create a 30 MB volume at the very beginning of the drive, and format this volume as /boot when you install Linux. That will give you more than enough room for the bootloader, but again it needs its own volume (and it has to be a primary)

quote:

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Originally posted by MeEtc
You can't convert a primary partition into a logical one. You will have to make a backup of the DATA volume, delete it, then create the logical partition to host the new DATA and the Linux volumes.

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Incorrect, you can do this with Partition Magic for definite, so I would assume you can do so in other tools.

quote:

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Originally posted by MeEtc
Another problem you may encounter, is that many BIOS's cannot boot from volumes after a certain cylinder number, I had the same problem. To overcome this, create a 30 MB volume at the very beginning of the drive, and format this volume as /boot when you install Linux. That will give you more than enough room for the bootloader, but again it needs its own volume (and it has to be a primary)

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This is correct. But you could be okay, most modern BIOS (especially ones which cater for SATA drives) can boot past this limitation.

quote:

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Originally posted by rob_botch
(Incidentally, this took ages, much longer than when I used a Windows program, I think PartitionMagic, on my old computer - are there any other free tools that anyone can recommend?).

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quote:

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Originally posted by andrewdodd13
gParted will have taken a long time to resize the partition because it likely had to move data from the end of the partition in to the new boundaries.

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Indeed, no other program will be much faster (gparted is probably of the fastest out there, seeing as it running alone without background crap slowing it down)