disk partitioning problem (ignore the first e-mail I did not mean to send that one)

[Bart Couvreur]

> Hello! 
>   
>   
>          According to my defrag report, witch I have as an attachment to
> this e-mail, I still have 22.65GB's worth of free space on my harddisk, yet
> when I used disk druid and chose the option to have my disk automatically
> formated with out erasing any existing partitions, and using the rest of the
> free space on my hard disk, it displayed an error message telling me "Error
> partitioning, could not allocate requested partitions partitioning failed:
> could not allocate partitions as primary partitions." What is the problem,
> and how could I fix this? I realy want to have linux installed on my pc, it
> will be my first distribution. 
>   
> #################The origional message I had sent before this one, that was
> already replied
> to#############################################################################
>  
> Hello!
> 
> 
> I already have windows XP home edition installed on my pc, and I am trying
> to configure my pc to duel boot between windows XP, and Fedora, but first I
> have to install fedora on a seperate partition. should this partition be a
> primary partition, or an extended one? also I was reading how to install
> fedore for windows duel boot on the download site <fedora.redhat.com> (the
> exact URL of my location was
> <http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/s1-x86-dualboot-parted.html>),
> and I got to the part where I am told to insert the CD
> (FC4-i386-rescuecd.iso for the "parted tool"), type rescue, select language,
> select skip when I am prompted "Will not attempt to find a Red Hat Linux
> install to rescue, and then finally where I am prompted (I guess by parted)
> on what partitions that I would like to repartition. I am told to type one
> of these commands at the prompt: parted/dev/hdx, or parted/dev/sdx; where
> "x" is the partition ! number of the hard drive that I want to partition.(On
> top of not knowing what command to use) Know I am aware that in Linux drives
> hda1-3 are resurved for primary partitions, while 4 is for a single extended
> partition, and 5 on up is for logical drives located with in the extended
> partition; but what number should I input into the "x" variable of my
> commands, so that I will not erase windows XP, but yet at the same time
> still have a fully functional linux operating system?(I would like my system
> to start up on windows XP upon start up, unless I press F8 and select Fedora
> from the boot menu(since I will be the only on in my house using linux
> Fedora.) 
>   
>

The 'x' you need will normally be a 'a' if you have installed windows
on your first ide hard drive or 'b' if it's on the second, etc. If
you've installed (or planniny to install) on an usb-disk, it wil be sd
+ 'a' (for the first), 'b' (for the second), etc...
This means you'll probably will have to enter: parted /dev/hda
hda1,hda2,hda3, ... are partitions on youre hda, the first drive

Hope this helps,
Bart