I am just starting my LFS project and right now I am trying to partition my disk. I am starting with Redhat 9.0 and I don't have cfdisk (??) so I am using fdisk. I type 'fdisk /dev/hda', which works and type 'n' to create a new partition, and I get the message 'No free sectors available'. Does anybody know why this is? Here are the results of a 'fdisk -l' from the command line.

/dev/hda1 * 1 1530 12289693+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 1531 4080 20482875 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 4081 4175 522112+ 82 Linux Swap
/dev/hda4 4196 7911 30250395 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 4146 6695 20482843 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda6 6696 7911 9767488+ 83 Linux

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

it might be that all your partitions are used up by other OS's.. you need to delete some partitions in order to reuse them.. in this case, a backup of anything important on those partitions are needed..

It's probably linked to NTFS or a kind of dynamic disk. You know that you have some space available, but at the end of your disk, there is sthing that gives the impression the disk is already full.I had sthing similar and I needed to change from dynamic disk to basic one to get through it, 'cause even parted (and disk-druid also) couldn't create a new partition.

try cfdisk!!! I just fixed the same problem..

To elaborate just a little. Even though you might have some unallocated disk space available you are unable to create another partition due to the fact that you already have 4 primary partitions (hda1 - hda4 ) and no free space inside the extended partition. Assuming the unallocated disk space is at the end of the drive you can resize the extended partition and then create additional logical partitions. You did not include the header information from the output of the fdisk -l command to know the total number of blocks on your hard drive to determine where your free space is located.

In a nutshell back in the old days of PCs hard drives could only be divided into 4 partitions. To overcome this limitation due to increasing size of hard drives and the desire to subdivide them more the extended/logical partitions were created. The original 4 partitions are now known as primary partitions. A primary partition can be designated as an extended partition which is just a container for logical partitions. Logical partitions are anything >= 5. If you look at the start/end blocks for hda5 and hda6 you will notice that they coincide with hda4.

I too had this very same problem. Solution was to get the extended partition re-sized.Try to get it done using fdisk , cfdisk , Gparted -> nothing works for me.
After that i tried parted [command line of the Gparted] Strangely it allows me to re-size my extended partition. CHEEERS !!

BR.