Hi All. I have a Dell E6510 laptop that runs most flavors of Linux just fine in a dual boot with Windows 7. I just received a new Seagate Momentus 750GB hybrid drive. I installed Windows 7, using a newly created a 500GB partition. So far so good. After everything was working, I tried to install pretty much all flavors of Linux on that remaining 250GB of free space. No distro would see that space. I even created a 5GB partition (for swap) and a 245GB partition for the rest but the installer(s) just did not see that space or those partitions. I was never able to install.

I really want this to work. Does anyone have a suggestion that I might try? Or is it just that Linux does not see cylinders that high up on a hard drive.

Any help is much appreciated.

- Dave

claussendb@gmail.com

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

What distributions have you tried to install? The new drive should be recognised no differently then the old drive. Did you leave the 250GB space as unallocated? Most distributions have a manual option to select existing partitions.

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It turns out that I was adding the partition before the Linux install but I made it a primary partition. Because I already had three partitions on the drive, Linux would not see the option of creating an extended partition - then a swap and root.

When I simply left the open space at the end of the drive, started the install of Linux (openSUSE)and selected to manually partition the drive, I was able to create an extended partition and then a swap and root on there.

I am good to go. I hope that this helps someone else. I should have know that was the issue. Sheesh .

Thanks for posting back. This happens to lots of people...