could not allocate requested partitions requested size exceeds maximum allowed

[stoat]

Originally Posted by mzsade

...what the hell is wrong with the installer

Nothing is wrong with the installer.

Originally Posted by mzsade

...can't it see the ton of frigging free space i have?

Yes, it can see it. It's plainly displayed in your screenshot. But it can't do anything with it.

You have four primary partitions. The partition table is full. In the current situation, no more partitions can be created regardless of how much free space exists out on the disk platters. To create more than four partitions on a traditional drive with an msdos partition table, one of the four primary partitions has to be an extended partition which can hold many more logical partitions. Fedora can exist entirely in logical partitions. Anyway, this happens all the time.

[mzsade]

If i delete my swap partition and create other extended partitions after that would it affect my previous Linux partition, and would it be able to identify and use the swap if it came after it in the logical disc order?

I am an ignorant, insolent waif, please adopt me...

[SlowJet]

The forth 4th partition must be an extended partition because a disk only has 4 primary partitions.

make the 4th partition an extended partition and the 5th a /boot ext4 of 512 MB and grub2 will mk a gpi out of boot with a 1,000,000 B offset.


Then make an LVM for as much as you want less 2.5 GB for a swap partition lv.
Make LV for everything (/ mount point of type ext4 f/s.)

SJ

OK, I was Slow.
I'm not sure of grub2 will work out there on an extended partition because the a gpi must be bootable from the /dev's first sector, not a first sectort in the partition?

[mzsade]

Er..could we go back a little and begin with the deletion of the swap partition to make way for extended partions? I am no "speedy Gonzalez" myself.

[rtguille]

For non-efi systems, f16 creates a gpt partitioned disk by default, but ONLY if it is not partitioned.
If the disk is mbr partitioned before launching anaconda, anaconda will use that (which for 3tb hdd is not good).

Delete/wipe the entire partition table, with dd (backup your data first)
Start anaconda with the disk(s) unpartitioned, and either use custom or the other options.
F16 will use gpt by default.

caveat:
* when using custom partitioning with f16 on non-efi systems (aka bios based), create the
first partition as type "bios boot" partition, with 1mb size. Be sure to create that partition, grub2
will be installed there automatically.

[Gareth Jones]

mzsade's drive isn't 3 GiB, that was chiuyan's.

mzsade: You don't need to reformat the disk as with GTP partitions, and doing so would likely not work with Windows (unless you're using Win64 on EFI).

The problem is that converting swap into an extended partition will only give you 3.5 GiB to repartition, and still no access to the rest of the disk. (You can only have one extended partition, and it is subdivided into logical partitions.)

You could try booting a live CD with GParted on it. Remove the swap partition and move the existing ext4 partition down the disk so that all the un-partitioned space is in a single block. Then create the new extended/logical partitions to fill that space.

After that, check your existing system's /etc/fstab, and look at the lines for "swap" and "/". If "/"'s line contains "UUID=blahblahblah" then it should just work. If it contains a reference to the device (sdablah) then change it to match the number that GParted reports for you old ext4 partition. Change the line for swap to also match the new swap partition number or UUID.

Of course, it goes without saying, backup /home at least first!

Gareth

---------- Post added at 05:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:26 PM ----------

Originally Posted by chiuyan

Thanks for suggestion! Does anybody know if Fedora 16 will have built in support for larger disks? Ubuntu does.

Yes, it seems to default to GPT if no existing table is found.

Gareth

[srs5694]

It's possible to convert partitions from primary to logical form. Some Windows tools will do this (although I don't have precise references), as will my FixParts program (part of the "gdisk" package in Fedora, IIRC). There are limitations to this ability, though. Most importantly, you need at least one free sector before each partition that's to be converted. It's unclear from the screen shot you posted, mzsade, whether that's the case on your disk. If it's not, you could delete /dev/sda3 (your swap partition), convert /dev/sda4 to a logical partition with FixParts, and then the Fedora installer should be able to create more partitions, LVMs, or whatever you like as logical partitions. Whatever you've got on /dev/sda4 might need some adjustments, though, so you should be prepared for that possibility. You might need to change its references to itself in /etc/fstab, and you'll almost certainly need to change its /etc/fstab entry for swap space to refer to the swap space you'll create to replace /dev/sda3. Depending on how you manage booting, you might need to adjust its boot loader configuration, too.

[chiuyan]

The problem seems to not be solved yet and maybe it won't be never solved for Fedora 16. Does anybody know if Fedora 17 has full support for large drives?

I'm personally using other tool to pre-partition the drive then I'm starting the Fedora 16 installer, but this way is not very pleasant.

[srs5694]

Chiuyan, Fedora 16 defaults to using GPT on blank disks, although it should stick with MBR if the disk is already partitioned that way. Thus, if you're starting with a blank disk (no partition table), you shouldn't see that error -- at least, not if it's being triggered by the problem that I and others here think is causing it. If the disk has already been used with MBR, though, it's conceivable that the installer would detect that and continue to try to use that system.

If you need a more precise answer, we'll need more precise information, such as the output of parted or gdisk on the disk. Type either of the following commands as root and post the results here:

parted /dev/sda print
gdisk -l /dev/sda

If you've got more than one disk, post the results for all of them (changing "/dev/sda" to "/dev/sdb" or higher for each run).

[chiuyan]

I need to install remotely Fedora 16 and I don't have access to command line, just graphical installer. Using datacenter rescue system I'm able to partition correctly, but it takes a lot of handwork specially for the 2MB partition for grub2, where I choose to no longer create it and install in masterboot. We need a way to partition using graphical install which does not defaults to GPT. It still using the old partition tools.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by chiuyan

I need to install remotely Fedora 16 and I don't have access to command line, just graphical installer. Using datacenter rescue system I'm able to partition correctly, but it takes a lot of handwork specially for the 2MB partition for grub2, where I choose to no longer create it and install in masterboot. We need a way to partition using graphical install which does not defaults to GPT. It still using the old partition tools.

F17-alpha defaults to GPT - at least on a blank disk.
During the install you can switch to a virtual console and wreak havoc - not that hard.

[srs5694]

Originally Posted by chiuyan

I need to install remotely Fedora 16 and I don't have access to command line, just graphical installer. Using datacenter rescue system I'm able to partition correctly, but it takes a lot of handwork specially for the 2MB partition for grub2, where I choose to no longer create it and install in masterboot.

If you're limited to the Fedora GUI installer, then your hands are tied, and there's only so much that anybody here can offer for advice. You may need to consult with your data center's help desk. If you're paying for hosting and the solutions they offer aren't doing the job, then you're entitled to some support. (At least, common sense says so; your contract may be abusive and say something else.)

If the problem is what I think it is, you might have some luck by starting over and telling the installer to create a fresh partition table. If you do that, it might switch from MBR to GPT and enable you to proceed. I'm not positive of this, though, and of course you'll lose any data you've already got on the disk.

We need a way to partition using graphical install which does not defaults to GPT. It still using the old partition tools.

In post #5 of this thread, you stated that you've got two 3 TB hard disks. MBR is not suitable for use on such disks. If, for whatever reason, you started out with an MBR partition table on those disks, then you must switch to GPT to use the disk's full size. Attempting the opposite is exactly the wrong thing to do. (There are workarounds that can wring MBR utility from disks up to 4 TiB in size, but I don't recommend using them, since they rely on quirks of the MBR definition that aren't honored by all OSes and utilities. I don't know offhand how the Fedora installer reacts to such partition definitions.)

Note also that there's no concept of extended or logical partitions in GPT, so your request in post #5 to find a way to create logical partitions is meaningless if the disk uses GPT. If it currently uses MBR, as I and others suspect, then you need to switch to GPT.

[chiuyan]

Originally Posted by srs5694

If you're limited to the Fedora GUI installer, then your hands are tied, and there's only so much that anybody here can offer for advice. You may need to consult with your data center's help desk. If you're paying for hosting and the solutions they offer aren't doing the job, then you're entitled to some support. (At least, common sense says so; your contract may be abusive and say something else.)

They don't support Fedora

Well, I have checked with parted and for some reason partition table was "msdos" by default, even if disks were new. I thought that installer will automatically make them gpt or convert to gpt.
Using the rescue system offered by datacenter I was able to change the partition table on both drives (they are new, unused).
~# parted /dev/sda mklabel gpt

At this point I was able to correctly install Fedora 16 on that machine.