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

["Leonard den Ottolander" <leonardjo hetnet nl>]

		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.
 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 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.

					Bye,

					Leonard.