Re: Having trouble to partition my hard drive during Red Hat Installation

["Diego del Rio" <diegodelrio hotmail com>]

Thank you for your help Leonard! Now i understand what's happening.

> Hi Diego,
>
> >     1GB Primary Dos Partition
> >     2GB Extended Dos Partition
> >     13 GB NTFS Partition
> >     3.1 GB Unallocated
> >
> > i failed when i tried to add the second
> > partition. I got the message "The partition you asked to add could not
be
> > allocated. No free primary"
>
>  Your problem is you only have one primary partition left. Although the
kernel
> has no problem with it there is not one distribution - that I know of,
maybe
> Grendel will tell me Debian can do this - that lets you create a second
> extended partition during installation. You can only create a second
extended
> partition during installation by trickery. fdisk will not even report the
> partitions inside the second partition properly. I think you'ld need
sfdisk
> for that.

What if i could boot the kernel from a floppy and run fdisk or sfdisk from
there to create the extended
linux partition? .. and then install linux on that partition, is it
possible?

>  The problem with a second extended partition is that if you create new
> partitions in the first extended the numbering of the partitions in the
second
> will shift as well. Although not recommendable for inexperienced users
there
> is no technical obstacle to implement this. Of course you should create
linux
> extended partitions, because windos will get confused by multiple extended
dos
> partitions.

>  So you either have to free some space on your extended partition and put
your
> swap partition there or you have to hide the extended partition manually,
do
> your install on an extended linux partition, edit /etc/fstab to reflect
the
> situation after the dos extended partition reappears. But this procedure
is
> somewhat dangerous if you are careless. Have a boot floppy handy at any
time.

I don't understand this part... when do i have to hide the dos extended
partition?
I haven't installed any linux system yet. So where is the /etc/fstab file
supposed to be found?

>  I recommend you try the first (create some space for a swap partition on
> hda2), but if you want to try the latter let me know and I'll dig in my
> archive for a description. In that case also post your current partition
> layout (fdisk -l /dev/hda), so we can make sure you fill in the right
> partitions when editing /etc/fstab.

I'll try the second way; in the next days i'll post the information you
asked me.

Thanks again Leonard.
Bye