Not Enough Free Space after Shrinking C:

[TroutBum]

I'm trying to install Fedora 13 on my HP dv6 laptop and when I try to use the Use Free Space installation type, I receive a Partitioning Error: Could not allocate requested partitions - not enough free space on disks. Before I started the install, I used the Disk Management utility in Windows 7 to shrink the volume of the C: drive down to 242 GB and leaving 210 GB Unallocated.

Here is what the screen looks like when I select Create Custom Layout (also receive the not enough free space error):

Device (sda) Size Type
sda1 199 ntfs
sda2 248,018 ntfs
Free 215,175
sda3 13,443 ntfs
sda4 103 vfat


Thank you in advance for any help.

G

[CSchwangler]

From what you have posted it looks as if you already have four primary partitions on that drive. Is that correct? If yes, then the cause of the error may be that you cannot create more than four primary partitions.

[bruno.taglienti]

It seems that you have you have 4 primary partitions. Since the sum of primary+extended partitions
cannot exceed 4, the "Free space" cannot be used.
My advice is:
1. Move sda3 near to sda2
2. Backup sda4
3. Delete sda4 and recreate sda4 as extended partition; take all the available space
4. Create a logical ntfs partition in sda4 of aize=103 GB; (will be sda5)
5. Reload the backup of sda4 on sda5
The free space on sda4 can now be allocated to as many logical partitions as you want; they
will be sda6, sda7, sda8,....

[scott32746]

Hello,

Most likely you are getting the error because there is no free space for linux
Need to figure out where your win7 is booting from and use the other.
Now you may have a rescue partition for win7 so be careful on your choice

[TroutBum]

I do have four primary partitions and it does look like one is Recovery. Attached is the screenshot from my Disk Management utility.

Bruno - I'm afraid I don't have enough experience to attempt what you are suggesting.

Thank you for all your responses.

[tommytt]

Originally Posted by TroutBum

I do have four primary partitions and it does look like one is Recovery. Attached is the screenshot from my Disk Management utility.

Bruno - I'm afraid I don't have enough experience to attempt what you are suggesting.

Thank you for all your responses.

Hi TroutBum;

One of the reasons some of us like linux is taht it gives us an opportunity to gain experience by fumbling through new things. Try Bruno's recommendation. We're here to help you along when/if you have problems. That doesn't mean we're going to do it for you, you need to do some reading to understand what we tell you.

History lesson:
Back when, Microsoft came up with the partitioning scheme that has predominated computers until recently (Google for GPT). Back then disk drives were small, maybe up to ~20 MEGAbytes so they thought no drive would ever need more than four partitions. To overcome that limitation the extended partition was defined to allow many "logical" partitions allowing partition count over four.
End History Lesson

The first step is to BACKUP each partition separately so you don't lose any data (always do this before making a change to your system, it really saves heartaches later).

Download PartedMagic from: http://partedmagic.com/download.html, burn to CD and boot from it. You want to click on partitioning. It will display a graphical image of the entire disk drive. Then follow Bruno's instructions.

Come back if you need more help.

Tom