disk sda already reached maximum allowed number of primary partitions

jamesbon · 10-07-2018, 12:26 AM

I tried installing fedora on my laptop which had Windows 7 pre installed I wanted to have a dual boot system boot things were not clear so I could not do it. I then later tried to proceed only with Fedora 28 on my laptop so that I can work but even during installation of fedora 28 from live USB I got errors. At the point to select installation destination things go wrong. As far as I know I need to create three partitions 1. Boot /boot 100mb 2 Swap 4GB 3 Root / 72 GB (the C drive of my Windows 7 installation) so this is what I tried to do also but I get errors.

"disk sda already reached maximum allowed number of primary partitions" There is C drive,E: drive and F: drive in my disk. Now I want to install Fedora in C drive how to do this any video on youtube which makes things clear I could not search. Here is a screenshot

As far as I know I need to create three partitions
1. Boot /boot 100mb
2 Swap 4GB
3 Root / 72 GB (the C drive of my Windows 7 installation) so this is what I tried to do also
but I get errors.

"disk sda already reached maximum allowed number of primary partitions"
A screenshot can be seen here https://i.stack.imgur.com/tivRB.jpg

syg00 · 10-07-2018, 01:02 AM

If you want to remove Win7 and only install Fedora, simply delete all partitions, then allow it to automatically allocate needed partitions. See step 6 here.

ondoho · 10-07-2018, 03:07 AM

"drive" is windows talk and really just means a partition on a physical drive/disk.
the maximum number of primary partitions is 4.
if you want more, you can create an extended partition (that one is a primary partition too), and many more logical partitions inside that.

syg00 · 10-07-2018, 04:10 AM

If you look at the image linked, there is already a logical partition. The message is in response to invalid input.

jamesbon · 10-07-2018, 07:37 AM

fatmac · 10-07-2018, 10:17 AM

From your photos, I'm seeing,

sda1 NTFS 100MB > that's your UEFI partition

sda2 swap 3.72GB > your swap partition

sda3 NTFS 97.66GB > your Windows partition(?) - to be used for your Linux installation?

sda5 NTFS 122.31GB > this is your 'extended' partition - this is data you want to keep?

So, you need to delete sda3, then recreate it, as a Linux partition, then you should be able to install your Linux distro into this partition, you will need to have your boot loader, grub, installed when it asks you, normally it goes into the MBR, but may be different on a UEFI system, so follow what the installer suggests.

If you still get problems, sda1 might need to be a msdos/vfat partition, the installer may ask you to change it.

jamesbon · 10-07-2018, 01:07 PM

As explained here from the disk management utility
From Disk Management Utility ( Win + X -> k )

Select the partition from which you are going to reduce some space.

Right click -> Shrink Volume... -> Amount of space to Shrink: amount in MB

Don’t shrink C drive unless you have large amount of space available there. Minimum 30 GB is recommended.

A freind of mine shrinked sda3 and 20Gb space was free and then we were able to install Ubuntu 16 on the machine in problem.

BW-userx · 10-07-2018, 02:49 PM

aahh yeah 30GB for Windows but that is not taking into account the updates windows does, as I had a 30GB standard size plus them other partitions windows does, then as of late ,I had to reinstall windows, to upgraded it to some "better" version of 10, but too it eliminated one partition, only using two, one of the OS and the other for whatever it uses that for, don't much pay attention to that, only that I bumped it up to something larger than 30GB ,due to no more space to do anything, due to updates it is always dumping in the system.

if you're going to start from the start, and wipe your hdd, then keep in mind you get 4 primary, and 4 extended, but if you are using GPT because someone said something about UEFI then you got a GPT so partitions are more or less unlimited. just plan out your attack before executing it, in relevance to partitioning out your hdd.