I am of course brand new to linux. I installed Fedora 18 because it was available and seems pretty newb friendly according to forums.

I allowed the install to set up partitions. Now running out of disk space for some files I recovered before Windows crapped out.

I run fdisk -l and here is output

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x76692ca8

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 1026047 512000 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1026048 7186431 3080192 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 953837566 976773119 11467777 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 7186432 112044031 52428800 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 953837568 975704063 10933248 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 975706112 976773119 533504 83 Linux

Of my 500GB HD I can only use about 53G. I tried searching in forums and even the guide on setting up partitions. However when I tried fdisk this was output

Command (m for help): n
All primary partitions are in use
Adding logical partition 7
No free sectors available

Just at a loss. Next step was going to be a reinstall and tryto set up partitions manually. Just thought I would try my first post here first. Thanks for any advice.

What does
show ?

do not get me wrong , i like fedora ,but that is not very true

I like Fedora , it is a great OS
but
it is very new to linux user UNFRIENDLY
you need to install all the rpm's from third party repos to play music and videos

fedora will never ship with any "non-free" software
so if it is patent and royalty encumbered , it will not be in the default install


by definition fedora is a TESTING distro
A "Research and Development " testing OS

now if you like to and WANT TO fix things when they break , then fedora is not a bad choice

fedora uses the "newest of the NEW "
this can cause a bunch of problems from time to time
so if you LIKE to fix software , rewrite some source code to get a program to build

fix a update that might kill the Gnome desktop leaving you only a terminal

and IF you want to fix things then fedora is a good choice

-- I do like using fedora BUT it is NOT for everyone
-- it requires a lot of work and learning and effort on the users part


well /dev/sda1 is the boot partition
/dev/sda2 is the SWAP partition
sda4 is the "extended" place holder , holding 4,5,6
that leaves sda4,5,and 6

guessing here so ???????
sda4 is /
sda5 is your /home partition
and sda6 ???????? is unknown , no idea what you are doing with it


so what one has 53 gig on it ?
sda4?
sda5 ?
or sda6 ?

the output of the command chrism01 posted will show that

The output from df -hT is:

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs devtmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 1.5G 248K 1.5G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 1.5G 3.9M 1.5G 1% /run
tmpfs tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda4 ext4 50G 4.0G 43G 9% /
tmpfs tmpfs 1.5G 24K 1.5G 1% /tmp
/dev/sda1 ext4 477M 93M 359M 21% /boot
/dev/sda6 ext4 497M 471M 0 100% /home


sda4 is the big chunk obviously, I just dont know how to get to the rest of my memory.

JohnVV, as to ... "it is very new to linux user UNFRIENDLY" I am coming to agree. Started researching and thinking of trying out mint, but that is a topic for another forum.

Thanks for your help so far guys and any futher is appreciated.

here is the problem
your HOME partition is the sixe that the /boot partition should be
500 meg

and not the recommended 5 to 15 Gig. minimum

reinstall
and if you are not familiar with setting up partitions
let the fedora 18 installer auto set it up as a LVM
or something like this
( you DO NOT need a "temp" nor a " /run" partition )

reformat the space fedora is on

/sda1 /boot 500 meg
/sda2 SWAP 2 gig
/sda3 / 20 gig to 40 gig ( or the rest of the drive )
/sda4 -- extended ---
sda5 /home 20 gig

Ok, I will be reinstalling ... as soon as I finish my work and email it to myself. I hope to say this is resolved soon, thanks for your help.

during install, was there an option to reclaim space? if so that is the problem. the new installer for Fedora is a little buggy and not near as clear as it used to be for over writing older data on a drive. You might have to "reclaim" space then use all free space afterwards.

the Fedora line is extremely newb friendly as long as you are not expecting all of the non-free stuff to work out of the box. It is fast, easy to learn, easy to manipulate, and is an industry standard like Debian, unlike the Ubuntu line that is anything but an industry standard no matter what Canonical would have you believe.

You will have to learn howto add additional repositories so you can add the non-free items like support for MP3's and the like...

Once you get F18 running google for howto install EasyLife Fedora This will help greatly as it will put several of the items you want right at your fingertips with a few clicks of the button.

So a little update. I began the reinstall and according to the install tools I had approximately 410GB of available space. However there was no space available to set up a boot partition.

I started a reformat and had to head back to work. My schedule is working against me on this one. 14 hour days 7 days a week. Hopefully after the format I can install and set up the partitions along the lines of John VV's suggestion.

The true sequence of the partitions on disk is
Sda1 , sda2, sda4, sda3
Notice the start and end position for each partition.

There is also a large gap between the end of sda4 and the start of sda3. This is where you lost disk space is.

Because all primairy partitions (partition 1-4) are in use there is no way that the partitioning software can allocate this lost space.
The solution is to reinstall and when the installation software asks for it tell it to just use the whole disk.

Thanks for the help guys. Once I formated and installed it was smooth sailing. Got a good lesson in setting up partitions from your help and the tutorials section. Now I am downloading Mint to try another distro.

practice makes perfect ( well better at least )

back with fedora 4 I reinstalled and reformatted many times after I messed things up

And i am still learning things

installing a OS is not something one dose everyday

well maybe everyday this week... Thanks again.