Hey all,

I am new to Linux and would like to explain what happened during installation of Fedora along side Win98 on the same drive. Here goes:

1. Ran scandisk and defrag through Win98. No errors and drive seemed to defrag correctly.

2. Used fips to create a new partition on the existing 40 GB hard drive. I split the existing Win98 partition into 10 GB for Windows and 30 GB should then be free space, right?

3. Rebooted into Win98. Windows was working normally, except now the zipdrive that was listed as drive "D:\" has been replaced with my new partition on the hdd.

4. Rebooted using CD. Fedora install started up. I was able to select language, keyboard and mouse settings. Next, went to the partitioning stage, where I got a message about the partition table being inconsistent. I could ignore this message and was assured by the installer that all would be well if I used the LBA. Not sure what that all means, maybe one of you guys can explain it to me.

5. Okay, now we are into the partitioning stage. Being a newbie, I tell it to do an automatic partitioning by using the existing free space. The installer comes back with "Could not allocate requested partitions. Partitioning failed: Could not allocate partitions as primary partitions." This was followed by an inablitiy to create the root partition.

6. I tried using the manual partitioning, and it came back with the same thing.

I have heard something about Windows using the end of the drive for it's swap file, and that could be the reason that the "free" space isn't free. Although when I ran defrag I was checking out the detail view (all of the changing colors and boxes had my attention locked in), and I believe that everything was shoved to the front of the drive. I plan on rerunning the defrager and checking to be sure.

I would really like to be able to try out linux. Can anyone explain to me how to get around this issue in layman's terms? Installing another hard drive is not an option, as there is no room in the case. If you need any more info about the specific setup of the machine, let me know what you need and I will get it for you.

Thanks again for any help you can offer!

Sean

It seams as those windows made the 30 GB space a FAT partition so there is no free, unpartitioned, space. You need to delete the 2nd partition so it is unpartitioned space before the linux installer will be able to use it.

Oops, forgot to mention that I tried running the installer without making a new partition as well. Got the same error message.