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

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

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