reinstalling FC 10 on a dual boot Ubuntu - Fedora machine

[tevang]

Dear Fedora users,

I'm trying to reinstall FC10 after a foolish mistake I've done that costed me operation of my Fedora partition (uninstalling SELinuxpolicycoreutils).
I have a dual boot Ubuntu - FC 10 machine and delete my old fedora partition with GParted. However when I try to install FC 10 from the live CD using the option "Use free space on selected drives and create default layout" I get the error message:

Could not allocate requested partitions:

Partitioning failed: Unsatisfied partition request
New Part Request -- mountpoint: None uniqueID: 6
type: physical volume (LVM) format: 1
device: None drive: ['sda'] primary: None
size: 0 grow: 1 maxsize: None
start: None end: None migrate: None fslabel: None origfstype: None
options: 'None'
fsprofile: None encryption: None.

The following errors occurred with your partitioning:

You have not defined a root partition (/), which is required for installation of Fedora to continue.

This can happen if there is not enough space on your hard drive(s) for the installation.

Press 'OK' to choose a different partitioning option.

This is the output of fdisk -l :

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf148bcfd

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 14407 115724196 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 29165 30401 9936202+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 14408 14432 200812+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 29165 30401 9936171 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order


Please someone guide me through the installation cause the documentation doesn't help! My last option is erase everything from my drive including the Ubuntu partition and start over the installation, something that I would like to avoid.

thanks in advance,
Thomas

[stoat]

However when I try to install FC 10 from the live CD using the option "Use free space on selected drives and create default layout" I get the error message:

Could not allocate requested partitions... Hello tevang,

As you know, the default Fedora layout includes an ext3 boot partition and an LVM physical volume that contains logical volumes for a root partition and a swap. That is a minimum of two partitions required for the default Fedora layout. However, even though your fdisk report shows plenty of unpartitioned disk space available on the hard drive platters (cylinders 14433 through 29164), there is room in the hard drive's partition table for only one more partition. You can only have four primary partitions (or three primaries and an extended). You currently have two primary partitions and an extended partition which is completely filled up by a sort of huge swap partition. Therefore there is no place for Fedora to create its two partitions.

Your fdisk rearranged by me into cylinder order and spaced back into columns to see the situation better...
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 14407 115724196 83 Linux <==1st primary partition
/dev/sda3 14408 14432 200812+ 83 Linux <==2nd primary partition
14433 29164 <==Unpartitioned and available space
/dev/sda2 29165 30401 9936202+ 5 Extended <==Extended partition
/dev/sda5 29165 30401 9936171 82 Linux swap / Solaris <==A huge logical swap filling the extended partition

See what I mean now? What I believe has happened (and only you can know if this is true) is that you deleted only Fedora's LVM PV and left its ext3 boot partition (/dev/sda3 maybe?). If that is true, then using GParted to delete Fedora's boot partition should then allow the re-installation of Fedora to occur again as it did the first time you installed it.

[tevang]

Thank you for your useful elaboration, indeed that was the problem!