Hi,

I am running into the following problem while trying to install RedHat Linux V8.0.

The computer onto which I ma planning to install Linux is a dual-boot PC, with both Win2k and WinXP installations. The hard drive is 40GB and I used Partition Magic to create ~10GB of free space.

Upon launching the installer and selecting the Disk Druid option to create partitions manually, I was presented the following information:

/dev/hda
/dev/hda1 NTFS/HPFS 20003 1 2550 <<note: XP is installed here>>
free free space 9994 2551 3824
/dev/hda2 extended 8158 3825 4864
/dev/hda5 NTFS/HPFS 8158 3825 4864 <<note: 2000 is installed here>>

Clicking "Add", I was able to successfully create both the /boot and swap partitions. However, when I tried to create the / partition, I received the following error message:

Could not allocate partitions: Partitioning failed: Could not allocate partitions

I received this message regardless of the size of the / partition. I then tried creating / first, then /boot, then swap. In this case, the error message appeared when I tried to create swap.

What can I do to make the installation move forward? Eliminating (or for that matter reinstalling) either of the two existing OS'es is not a viable option. Nor is adding another hard drive as the computer in question is a notebook.

The problem seems, I believe, to stem from the fact that the free space you have is not in the extended partition. Under the current disk architechture you can have 4 primary partitions (hda1 -->hda4), and if you want more than this, one of the primary partitions needs to be an extended partition (as is the case with your current hda2). The extended partitions holds all of the other partitions, called logical partitions, which start at hda5 (since hda1 --> hda4 are reserved for primaries). Now, you have an hda1 which is a primary, and an hda2 which is an extended, and hda5 which is a logical. In order to use more than 2 partitions (hda3 and hda4) you'll need to have the free space as part of the extended parttion. As it stands, your best bet would, IMO, be to use Partition Magic and possibly something like Ghost (God, I haven't mentioned that in a while) to move the data from each partition around so that the free space is at the end of your harddisk and not in the middle.

I hope that wasn't too convoluted and confusing, and good luck.