Nigel Henry wrote:
As it's quite this afternoon, I thought I'd ask this question, as it's a bit
puzzling to me.
A while back as I'd run out of available harddrive space for new FC versions,
I resized the original harddrive from this machine that had XP preinstalled
on it, using the gparted live cd, and it went like clockwork. XP with 12GB,
and the rest was now free space.
Next I install Kubuntu on the drive, giving it a /, and a /home partition, let
it have half of the freespace, as I also wanted somewhere for another
instance of FC5. For some reason custom partitioning named the partitions as
hda5, and hda6 for / , and /home respectively, and Kubuntu didn't ask, and I
couldn't find a way to make a swap partition. No problem as there is 1GB of
RAM on the machine. So far so good. Grub's in the MBR, and both Kubuntu, and
that other OS bootup ok.
Now it gets confusing.
I go to install FC5, again with custom partitioning as I always do, and create
a / partition of 9GB. No problem. Next create a /home partition of 4GB, and
again no problem. Now I try to create a swap partition, and get a complaint
about not enough partitioning space, or something like that, even though
there is just on 1GB of harddrive space available.
Now I remove the 4GB home partition, and try to create the swap partition
again. This time no problem, and I have an 800MB swap partition. Now I try to
recreate the /home partition (4GB, and enough space), but again a no-go, and
a complaint about not enough partitioning space/no partitions available.
Ok. I'm not too bothered about the swap, so I remove the swap partition, and
use all the available free space to recreate the /home partition, put Grub in
the / partition for FC5, and some time later after editing
Kubuntu's /boot/grub/grub.conf, adding a chainloader to FC5's root partition,
all 3 OS's boot ok.
The confusing bit is the available partitions. XP has got hda1, Kubuntu has
got hda5, and hda6, and FC5 has got hda3, and hda4. Quite why Kubuntu was
given hda5, and 6 when it was installed 1st, and FC5 was given hda3, and hda4
I don't know, but either way it would appear (leaving out XP from the
equation) that there are only 4 available partitions left on this drive for
Linux.
I've probably done something wrong somewhere, but can anyone shed any light on
this confusing problem.
Your Saturday afternoon puzzler posted from Northern France. Weather cloudy
but dry, 70°F, if I've done the C to F correctly in my head. Very light
breeze, and with a beer in my hand, sitting in the cellar looking out on the
back yard, all in all a nice afternoon. (UTC+2)
Nigel.
I'm guessing that you checked the "make this a primary partition" box.
Don't do that.
If that doesn't help, do "fdisk -l" and post the result.
Anyone with enough taste to drink beer in France deserves help.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
