Hello, in the installation, Fedora will read my drive and list the partitions..I have a Serial Hard drive with a windows XP partitions.

I try to automatically partition the drive and it won't do it becuase it says it cannot make a primary partition.

I try to manual partition the drive and get the same thing.

Any ideas?

do you have free space on the drive?

yes, I have 100 GB free on the hd

I'm not very familiar with fedora, so if you could answer these questions, it would help me:

1) does fedora have a text-mode or a graphical installer (ie. can you run programs from the command line while installing)?

2) what disk partitioning program does fedora use (ie. fdisk or something else)?

3) what does your partition table look like?

4) what is the exact error message you get?

1) graphical
2) i think diskdrake or something like that

Last time I installed Red Hat (which was a while ago now), it gave me an option of how I wanted to partition my drive -- automatic partitioning with some weird utility or manual partitioning with fdisk. Since Fedora is closely related to Red Hat, it might give you a similar option. Choose manual partitioning. It should give you a table that shows what sort of partitions you have and how big they are. There should be at least one: your windows xp partition, and there should also be some free, unpartitioned space. Have a look at the partition table and post the list of partitions up on this forum.

I managed to partition the drive.
The problem was that windows is a ntfs file system and the linux partitioning cannot do it.

I used partition magic from the windows platform to partition the drive and everything worked out...finally!

Congrats. Good luck with linux!

i know this is done and dusted, but i think i should add my 2 cents

1. The program the installer uses i believe is called Disk Druid

2. I had a similar problem where he installer wouldn't partition and it turned out the reason was that i had too many primary partitions (i made my swap partition logical to fix it)