I tried the rescue mode with the install CD. It didn't work, either.

I have no idea what to try next. With a 160 GB hardrive, I should be able to have 2 primary partitians, shouldn't I? And as far as I know, the partitianing tool, QTParted should not be just an information tool. Yet that is all that can be done with it.

Re-reading thru' all the postings has left me confused. What do you currently have on your disk ? Do you still have your windoz installation and FC5 and want to preserve them both ? Or is that you have just got Windoz on the second partition and you want to preserve it ?

Or is that you just want to reformat the whole drive and devide it into more than one partition ?

You say that you are a newbie but probably trying to get ahead of yourself. In an attempt do so possibly missing out on something.

You mentioned that, none of the partitioning tools work for you. What is the exact nature of error ?

Reading thru' your first posting, you have a linux partition which ~101MB and an unknown partition which is ~149GB with about 8GB or so unaccounted for. I think, you kinda seriously messed up and left with just one partition - linux boot partition and a windows partition ! That is the reason why you possibly can boot into linux but, cannot run fdisk as /sbin doesn't exist. I just am not sure.

Use the installation CD and see what the partitioning tool tells you. Note the partitions and their sizes including any unallocated/free space if any and post the results.

I wanted to have a triple boot system with XP, Ubuntu and Fedora. When I tried to create a separate partition for fedora during installation, it failed. I tried all the options available on the install CD. (I had tried to create a partitian before the installation, but that failed, too.) I continued with the installation of Fedora, thinking that what couldn't be done with windows on this computer, could be done with Fedora.
I wanted to use QTParted or GParted to create another partitian, but both programs will only give information on the harddrive and the partitians already there. The first partitian is a boot partitian - "'/dev/sda1' ext3 size>101.94MB used>18.82MB '/boot'". The other is where the OS and the free space is - "'/dev/sda2' unknown (actually LVM) size>148.95GB". Neither of these programs works beyond giving info. The option to create or to resize a partitian is greyed out. I have no idea why a partitianing tool would only work as a partitian information tool.
As a newbie, I'm lacking in a lot of technical education, yes, but as I have read several "howtos" about having windows and linux on the same machine, I believe there should be some way to do this. Yet so far no instructions from any "howto" nor any partitianing program has worked for me. I wish I knew more than I do. As I don't, I am trying to learn as well as I can. I must ask questions when I cannot find what I need on my own. I've spent a lot of time googling this issue and reading. Perhaps a different search term would get me to the info I need. I've expended every term I can think of though.
I want to reformat the whole drive and have Windows XP, Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu on it. I believe that calls for three primary partitians. I want to use grub as the bootloader.

I use GParted to add/remove/resize/move/etc partitions. For this to work, you have to unmount them before modifying. Its available in the right-click menu.

PS: How do you expect to modify while in mounted(running) state?

I tried to unmount, but it could not be unmounted. I suppose there could be a way to unmount the hard drive and use the program that is installed on it, but I do not know how.
As for the right click menu, it is greyed out.


PS: How can anything be accomplished without there being something to run the software?

Have you tried using Gparted as root? If yes maybe try unmounting in terminal

PS: Put your 'brain' to work, stop depending on 'something' to run the software

Of course I tried as root! I'm new to computers and newer to fedora, but do not mistake a lack of knowledge as being stupid. That question about something to run the program was about the hard drive. I'll break it down for you. If the hard drive is not mounted, and the program 'gparted' is on the hard drive, what will run the program? Can a program on a hard drive be run with the hard drive off? (I doubt I can load it to my brain!)

I must agree with you here ! Yep, you cannot unmount the partition you are working in ! umount would say - Drive busy !

I suggest, you boot with your linux installtion CD and when you come to partitioning stage, select expert mode or partition manually, whatever option the installer gives you. Once into the partitioning tool, delete all the partitions and recreate them. I suggest that you install XP first as XP will always write to the MBR when installed. Once XP is installed you can go ahead with the two flavors of linux ubuntu and fedora. Make a note of the partition to which you installed yous OSs so, you don't owerwrite an already installed OS.

The bootloader installed by the last linux OS you installed should be able to create a bootloader config listing XP and the two linux installtions. Thus you can use linux bootloader to boot into any of the 3 OSs you got.

I'd suggest creating more than 3 partitions to safeguard you data. Not to mention, you'd need swap partitions for each of the linux distro you install. So, you probably should go for three primary partitions and an extended partition which would further be sub-divided into a convenient number of partitions.

Letz putt in a rough estimation. One primary partition for XP (which obviously shall be the first primary patition as Windoz demands it). Another for ubuntu and yet another for fedora. You'll need a swap partition for each of the linux distros installed which, can be created as logical partitions in extended partition. One thing worth mentioning is that, you can do with just one swap partition and share the swap partition between the two linux distros. But, you should never use suspend to disk (or hibernate in windoz terminology) as this will lead to corruptions. This is because, suspend2disk uses swap partition to save suspend info. If you suspend from fedora and boot into ubuntu, ubuntu may try to resume from fedora's suspend info as both ubuntu and fedora share the same swap and this could corrupt your filesystem and more. So, if you want to use suspend2disk, create seperate swap partitions for both ubuntu and fedora.

Finally, you might wanna have seperate partitions for holding your data, a FAT partition to share data between linux and XP and another reiserfs or ext3 o hold you linux data. Or you can create a big FAT partition to store/share data from linux and XP. The choice is up to you. It would be advisable to put in a thought about the partition sizes for linux, XP, swap and data.

Well it took days of trying, but I've got my harddrive partitianed into 4 parts. After trying every way possible through fedora (as far as I understand it anyway), I reinstalled windows, then tried to use the gparted live cd again. It didn't work, so I threw it away, and being the stubborn type, I downloaded and burned it again. It took over an hour of trying (I was at the cussing point), but it finally loaded. Once loaded, it worked very well.
My hard drive is now divided this way:
'/dev/sda1 fat32 5 GB' (Windows Recovery partitian)
'/dev/sda2 htfs 44 GB' (XP partitian)
'/dev/sda3 ext3 46 GB' (for Ubuntu)
'/dev/sda4 ext3 54 GB' (for Fedora)
I am quite pleased that I was finally able to get this accomplished. Thanks everyone for your assistance and most especially for your patience with a newbie.

-Merlin
"When the surgeon's knife doesn't work, use the dynamite!"