windows 7/fedora 12/ubuntu boot

[novascroller]

hi, i recently bought a 320 gig hd and wanted to have it set up to boot 3 operating systems. so i installed windows 7 first on a 200 gig partition of the hard drive. after that i installed fedora 12 on a 50 Gig partition of the hard drive, which should give me another approx 50 gigs for Ubuntu. so i tried installing ubuntu but its not recognizing the 50 gig fedora partition, it just sees approx 100 gigs free. i didn't continue the installation on the fear that the ubuntu install will wipe out my current fedora install. is there any way to install all ubuntu and not destroy the fedora install?? thanks, i did a fdisk from my terminal window in fedora and here is what i'm dealing with:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x21c429da

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 13 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 13 25497 204696576 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 25497 25522 204800 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 25523 38913 107563207+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 25523 38913 107563008 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 52.4 GB, 52428800000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6374 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 4227 MB, 4227858432 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 514 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000


any help would be appreciated.

[stoat]

Hello novascroller,

To me, you don't have any room to install anything else. All 38,913 cylinders of your hard drive are accounted for in the existing partitions of that fdisk report. It looks to me like the Fedora system is in an LVM physical volume which took all of that ~100 GB that you intended to split between Fedora and Ubuntu.

P.S.: I just noticed that /dev/dm-0 is 52.4 GB. That probably represents the logical volume in the LVM physical volume with the root partition. And /dev/dm-1 is probably a swap of 4227 MB. So I guess that 50 GB of free space that you have is inside that LVM physical volume. I don't think you can do anything with that for Ubuntu. Maybe you can shrink the physical volume and create some free space outside of the physical volume but inside the extended partition. Ubuntu could use that.

[novascroller]

thats odd because i specified 50Gb when i installed Fedora.

[stoat]

Originally Posted by novascroller

thats odd because i specified 50Gb when i installed Fedora.

Well, the 100 GB physical volume has a 50 GB logical volume inside of it (the Fedora root partition).

Do you really want Logical Volume Management for this situation? If not, then I would install Fedora again and choose the "Create custom layout" partitioning option. Then, with the so-called disk druid on the next page, create standard ext3 or ext4 partitions for Fedora. Even a single ext3 or ext4 will work for Fedora 12. If you don't want to re-install Fedora, then you can enter into the parallel universe of Logical Volume Management and teach yourself how to shrink that physical volume by the amount of free space in it. Then the free space will be outside the physical volume but inside the extended partition where Ubuntu can use it.

Logical Volume Management is kind of interesting actually. It's a wonderful thing for spanning a large system across multiple hard drives. But in some situations, it's just an unnecessary layer of complexity with little benefit for it. If you want to learn LVM, then go for it. If it was just an accident this time, then it messed you up but good.

[novascroller]

ok i resized the PV so that its just larger than the LV and swap but when i try to install Ubuntu, its still only seeing the 102G free.

[novascroller]

anyone??? i'm still not sure why Ubuntu is seeing 100GB for a PV. it doesn't see Fedora 12 at all.