Okay,


I'm like pulling my hair out here, I've spent a good 12 hours trying to get Red Hat installed, and I'm just plain out of ideas.


I'm running XP, trying to dual boot, I've got the three ISO's everything's peachy. My problem is with the partitioning.


I have like 35 gigs of unformatted, unallocated free space I've been saving for this OS. When I get to the partition window, first off I get an error message about how my boot partition may not meet booting constraints...yadda yadda. I've heard this has something to do with the boot sector the free space is on, and if I install GRUB it won't be a problem....so I click ignore, and continue.


My big problem though, is that Disk Druid doesn't seem to be recognizing my free space correctly. It shows it correctly on the formatting screen (around 33,000MB of "Free Space"). but when I try to create root and swap partitions it'll only allow me to use around 3500MB of space before I get this message:

Unable to create partition which extends beyond the end of the disk.


?????????


I'm really hoping I'm missing something easy, because I've exhausted every troubleshooting idea I can think of. You guys really are my last hope. Any help, emphasis on any help at all, would be tremendously appreciated. Even if its just a link to a document or site, or anything at all, I'd really appreciate it.



Peas

Hi Cap Ahab

Install XP FIRST - make sure you leave some free space at the end of your drive for Red hat

Install Red Hat 2nd - as your going through the Red Hat install process it will ask you about the partitons you want and were you wnat to install.

If youve got free space choose - "install in existing free space"

Let Red Hat Automatically partition the free space for starters - when you get more experienced you can always redo all this manually and set up some more fancy partitions.

Youll have a choice of bootloaders either GRUB or LILO

Install the bootloader in the MBR.

Again later on when you get more experienced you can always go back and start with:

XP NTFS /dev/hda1
XP/Red Hat9 FAT32 /dev/hda2

Red HAt 9 Ext3 /boot /dev/hda3
Red HAt 9 Ext3 / /dev/hda4
Red Hat 9 Swap /dev/hda5

or even include /home /usr /var

(oh and Red Hat 9 is funny about manualy re-sizing its boot partition - for starters let it partition Automatically - it wont moan then)

Thnx Skyline,


I appreciate the help more than you know, but unfortunately I tried that already. When I couldn't do it manually, I stepped back and tried to let it partition itself. I set it to the option "leave all existing partitions and use the rest of the free space" ....or something like that. Here's the error message I get when I try:


"Could not allocate requested partitions":
"Partitioning failed: Could not allocate partitions"

....Then when I click okay

"You have not defined a root partition (/) which is required for installation of RedHat Linux to continue"


....I thought it would define a root partition for me, being as I selected for it to automatically partition for me, but hey...what do I know?

To make matters more interesting, when I looked up this error message on Google, it said something about it could be from not having enough harddrive space to finish the install.....35GB not enough? Which makes me wonder if for some reason Disk Druid isn't reading my free space correctly......oh well I've chewed your ear long enough, I'll shut up now.
I mean now.

when i was getting those same error messages about booting constraints, i had to reformat the drive (partition in your case) with fdisk -- can't remember if i used linux or windows fdisk, but i think i did it from a win98 boot disk. once i did that, everything went along fine.

edit: oops, let me just clarify to say don't reformat your win partition (unless you want to, of course). try using something like partition magic to create a new partition from the free space (or disk druid if that will do it), and then format the new partition with a win boot disk (if you don't have one, you can get one from bootdisk.com).

Is the free space contiguous? Did you ran defrag in windows to separate free space and not? Also what if you write boot manager to MBR?

Hi Capn Ahab

Sorry it hasn't worked out so far - that error message should only come up when you manually setup/resize Red Hat partitions - in such a way that Red Hat doesnt like the cylinder start and end points youve chose - or if the manuall partitions are not contiguos - ie if youve got XP on the far left of the graphic then a Red Hat boot partiton next to it but then a space between the boot partition and the root and swap -

There can't be any spaces between your Red Hat partitions - they must be contiguos

Youve probably done this but just in case, when setting your drive up install XP then make sure you leave completely free space at the end of your drive for Red Hat - ie if youve got Partition Magic - dont use it in advance to set up a partition in the free space - let Red Hat install automaticaly in the completely free space.

Hope it works out.

Does Redhat 9.0 like NTFS 5.0 nowdays? With redhat 7.2 I used fat and win 2000 and it worked...but win2000 with ntfs and redhat 7.2 partition was difficult to make...I gave up then. But this was long time ago.

But windows with fat sucks.. :-)

-Tommi

Ok Cap'n Ahab I think now you have two partitions on your harddrive, one is the windowsXP and the other "unrelocated".
I would suggest using windows fdisk just to HAVE A LOOK at your partition pattern, whether the pattern is shown as above. OR, you could use the "Administrative tools" uner windowsXP, ->Computer Management->Disk information and see whether your hard disk is INDEED in the situation as pre-defined above.

//////Here is the suggestion if you DID NOT succeed in other ways.!!!!!!!!
If all those is OK and still you can not install the RH9, I could suggest using PartitionMagic to create a swap space and ext2 on your harddrive and during the installation, choose "erase" the linux partition and go on.

Last, I am indeed suspecting whether your harddisk is partitioned as you have imagined. Try the first approch and post the result please.

Much thanks to all of you,


I writing this reply from my newly installed RedHat 9.0 OS. I'm not sure how the problem got fixed, but here's what I did.

I ran fdisk under windows, and formatted my existing freespace under NTFS. I then defragmented all of my drives, and when I rebooted RedHat it went mostly okay.

One strange thing though, I wasn't able to create a swap partition.....it still wouldn't let me partition automatically, and everytime I tried to create a swap partition under manual mode I kept getting an error message. So I installed with only /, and /boot partitions.

I do still want a swap partition though, but I'll save that for another thread. For now I just wanted to let you all know how much I appreciated your help, I couldn't have done it without ya!