Hey everyone, I recently decided to give slackware a shot after experimenting with other distributions. I started the install and embarrassingly didn't make it very far... It asked me to partition the hard drive and I chose to use cfdisk (this is because I read it was easiest for people with more of a windows background.) I ended getting a FATAL ERROR! Here is the quote "FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder" Before I tried to install slackware I shrank my windows 7 partition (I am trying to make this a dual boot system.) I thought that having this unallocated space would make the partitioning for the installation go smoothly, but it isn't working out as of yet. Was I wrong in doing that? What should I do to fix this fatal error?

cfdisk runs in dos-compatible mode, I think.
Windows doesn't use that anymore.

Partition the disk with fdisk (use commands c and u to turn off dos-compatible mode) or set up your partitions with a Gparted live cd

Ok I actually have a GParted live cd laying around here. How would I use that to set up the partitions?

Also, I already have 4 partitions on my computer so it cant create any more of them... the first (/dev/sda1) is labeled as system. The second (/dev/sda2) doesn't have anything under the label section but it is by far the biggest partition with 180 gigs on it (about 57 used up. the third one (/dev/sda3) is labeled as recovery and the fourth one (/dev/sda4) is labeled as HP_TOOLS. They are all ntfs except for HP_TOOLS which is a fat 32. I hope I provided enough information.

Thanks in advance for all of the help guys.

cfdisk should still work. I use it as well an big harddiscs (500 GB).

If you have problem with your partition table, try some old win98 bootdisc. After my experience fdisc used there is the most stable when it comes to recover a bad partition table.
At least it was my rescue once, when I tried to resize a partition with partition magic, which crashed during the process leaving me with a destroyed partition table. Linux's fdisc or cfdisc wouldn't touch the harddisc anymore, quitting with an error message, win 2000 or later cdroms just got a bluescreen. Using an Win98 boot disc I finally could recover my partition table, even without loosing data.

Try something like fdisk /fixmbr, This should to the trick, or run it and just save your partition table then.

Good luck.

I'm pretty sure partition 1 is only needed if you want to encrypt your hard drive with bitlocker.

Partition 2 is probably your Windows C drive

Partition 3 (and maybe 4) are needed to restore Windows. (If you have a Windows 7 dvd, then you probably don't need these)

You can only have 4 primary partitions with an msdos partition table, but if you give up one of those partitions you can create an 'Extended' partition. An Extended partition is basically a primary partition that can be split into many 'Logical' partitions.

So you'll have to delete one of your partitions (either 1, 3, or 4) to make room for an extended partition. Then shrink partition 2.

In the space that you freed by shrinking partition 2, you can create some logical partitions for Slackware. At minimum, you should create a partition for swap and /. Some people like to put /home or other folders on it's own partition, but that's up to you.

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

Just my .

I would use the M$ Win/7 tools to first defrag the NTFS filesystem. Then use the M$ tools to shrink the partition size to the amount required. You can then use either qparted, cdfisk or fdisk to manage the remaining partition requirements. Be sure to perform a backup before any work on the disk so that you can revert. Plus hopefully you do have any recovery disk sets or install CD/DVD needed.

Thank you so much everyone! I was able to set up everything effectively and just finished the install for slackware! However, when I try to boot it, it just stops where I still see text. It doesn't send me to a desktop Not to mention it tells me to log in, but I never set up any username... so I log in as root and still no desktop It looks like I have some work to do

Have you tried typing at the terminal?

When I first started with Slackware, I bought a paperback copy of the Slackware Essentials 2nd Edition book. It has helped me ALOT ever since! Check it out! =)

Hi,

First thing after login as root then run 'adduser' to create account for your user(s). Be sure to add that user to the groups via additional group prompt and pressing up-arrow for suggested groups. You can edit the line via the arrow keys and other line edit keys.
Suggested groups;
You can then login via the new user on another console.

Awesome! Thank you all so much for the helpful comments! The community support (which is amazing) is one of the factors that made slackware so attractive to someone like me trying to find the right distro. I really appreciate all of the help and hope to learn enough to be able to contribute to the community one day