No space for new partition on SATA drive, but 61GBfreespace

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Roger Heflin wrote:
> Nigel Henry wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> 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 /.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Thanks for any suggestions.
>>
>> Nigel.
>>
> 
> 
> It is not a SATA thing.
> 
> You only get 4 primary partitions, usually the last of the primaries is 
> an extended partition containing *all* of the rest of the space, if the 
> last partition does not contain all of the rest of the space, well, you 
> cannot use it without repartitioning.
> 
> There does not seem to be a limit on the number of the partitions in an 
> extended partition, but there could be limits in some of the tools to 
> deal with things.
> 
> There is a limit of the total number of partitions that a single disk 
> can have and I think that was 16 so your aren't quite there yet.
> 
> I would suggest not creating /home for each installation (just for the 
> first one) and then changing fstab to mount a shared home, the only 
> steps that would need to be done to properly do this would be to make 
> sure the UID/users on all distributions are the same, and make sure 
> fstab on each distribution has it added as an entry.
> 
>                                Roger
> 
I would also suggest not using a primary partition for swap. For 
that matter, I have drives that are formatted with /boot as the only 
primary partition (except the extended partition) and everything 
else as a logical partition in the extended partition. One thing to 
keep in mind is that you are going to run into problems if you have 
more then 16 partitions on the drive. (Not counting the extended 
partition.) I think this is a limit in the SCSI drivers, and allmost 
all drives are now handled as SCSI drives now.

Mikkel
-- 

   Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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