why is the max. allowed space for new partition only 1.4MB? (suse 9.1)
 

hi I wanna make a hda6 FAT32 partiton to share stuff between Linux and Windows but YaST says the max. allowed space is 1.4MB and I still have about 1GB free space. does anyone know why? coz 1.4MB is nothing....

Did you make it an Extended partition? There could be errors if you make any partitions beyond the fourth a primary. If you make it extended, you should have no problems, unless, of course, it already is.

Oh, and if you are trying to share with Windows, Windows, in my experience, does not play nice and share well with extended partitions.

..including the fourth (it has to be the extended...a fifth isn't allowed). I'm sure you meant that, but just to be sure...

then you can have a dozen more! :D

I got 6 hda's (one is just called hda no number) and one of those six is an extended. so how do I make an extended hda?

Then you're already set. When you partition, you get up to 4 primaries. If you need more partitions, you make the fourth an extended partition and then you can define (I think) up to 13 logical drives inside that extended partition.

You already have one. Any partitions numbered higher than your extended one would be logical drives. If you have the space free inside your extended partition, you're okay. If your free space is after the extended partition, you're out of luck unless you want to resize some of them (which will likely cause data loss - like everything on that partition)

Post the output of:
fdisk -l /dev/hda (thats a small L)

You might have 1GB total free space on hda but... the free space available inside the extended partition might only be 1.4MB. Hopefully you have a primary partition available. If not you might need to resize or move partitions.

BTW you can split an IDE drive into 64 partitions.

64. I thought that # was low. Thx for the correction

Futhermore, you can only create 16 partitions on SCSI drive.