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@xxxxxxxxxxxx> [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.

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