Linux Partition Issues with Fedora 7
 

Greetings:

This is my first Linux install and I probably have missed something... I have an Intel desktop with XP Pro on it. Booting to the Fedora iso disk I created. I am now at the page where one must partition the hard drive. On this machine I have two:

sda 78529Mb ATA HDS722580VLAT20
sdb 9774Mb ATA WDC102BB

Next...
Warning You have chosen to remove all Linux partitions (and all data from them) on the following drives /dev/sda /dev/sdb

Are you sure you want to do this?

Regrettably, no choice allows the installaton to proceed. The last message is: Could not allocate requested partitions: Partitioning failed. Could not allocate partitions as primary partitions. Not enough space left to create partition for /boot.

Not enough experience to troubleshoot. Advice sought

The typical installer gives you several partitioning choices, including, eg:
Use existing
Erase disk and create new
manual
and some others maybe....

If you want to keep XP, then the first question is whether you have empty (unpartitioned) space on either drive. The manual partitioning option should show you that.

If you do not have empty space, you will need to re-size the Windows partition (or simply re-install Windows). For re-sizing, i would recommend GParted, which is a stand-alone bootable CD (download the .iso and burn the CD)

Side note: That 10GB drive might be quite old. You might want to consider retiring it (before it fails at some inopportune moment)