I'm trying to get redhat 7.3 installed and when I get to the partitioning stage I keep getting a partitioning failed: could not allocate partition error. Any idea what causes this. For referance, the machine is a pentium 75 with 24 meg, and a 1.2G drive. I have disk access set to other as directed in the bios for a unix system. I tried it in dos access mode and that didnt work either.

Hmmm, this shouldn't happen (so far, I'm not much help).

So what we're going to do is to bypass that newfangled partitioning software and get back to the god old (reliable) stuff.


Reboot again with the Redhat CD and let the install process get to where it asks about your partions.

Then follow these instructions:

1) Hit <CONTROL><ALT><F2> to enter into a new tty.

2) Type in "fdisk /dev/hda" and hit enter.

3) hit "p" to print out your current partitions.

4) Hit "d" and the partition number(s) to delete these partitions. Delete them all.

(I'm assuming that you have a "linux only" disk here and it currently does NOT have any data that you wish to keep. Because this will surely destroy any data on it).

5) hit "n" and create a 128 meg partition. This will be your swap on your meager disk. Did I say "meager"? Sorry.

A "primary" partition on a linux only machine will do just fine, so make this partition #1.

6) Hit "t" and change this partition type to "linux swap". This would be type #82.

7) Hit "n" and create another partition using the remainder of the drive. It should default to the "linux" type (#83). Make this partition #2.

8 Hit "w" if you are sure that this is what you want to do. Otherwise hit "q".


The easiest thing to do now would be to cycle power on your box and restart the installation -- this time skipping the partitioning portion of the install.

If you still get this error try adjusting the size of your partitions, but I think that this will do it for you.


Here's a nice little fdisk tutorial:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplan...orials/3174/1/


John

I tried that and it is installing right now. Hope I did it right. I only set up 2 partitions, the root partition and the swap.

Two partitions is just fine, I prefer at least three, the third one for my linux backup files. Any other partitions on the disk would be used for various distros, and/or versions of distros.

As far as the "right" way to partition a disk goes, ask three people and get yourself four answers


John

I ended up trying it with the partition utility in RH6.2 and made a swap partition twice the size of my RAM and then a root partition that filled up the rest of the disk. It seemed to work and installed but then gave me some error at the very end of the install so Im going to try it again. Being that this machine is just a web server, am I ok with those partitions that I used the first time? The main partition should just be named "/" correct?

That all sounds good, I would like to know what the error was, but since Redhat got past the formatting stage OK and went on to installing software, I would think that the partitions are fine.

There's no need to repartition your drive for the next install, what you have should be fine.

And yes, "/" is what you want for your root directory.


John

I dont remember exactly what it sait but it was something along the lines of fatal error, install failed of something very non specific. I tried again with a different drive and partitioned the same way with disk druid and it installed fine this time with the exception of not finding the network card. Thanks for the help. For future referance though, if I did want to set up a 3rd partition say so that I had a system partition and a partition for my web files, how would I name it? I assume that it would just be a second linux native partition right? could I just give it a name like "/webs" or something of that nature?

I've got 20g for /, 20g for /home, 500mb for swap and 34.5g that I haven't decided what to do with yet (new hard drive :-).
I might have to write a small howto on moving a linux install from two old hard drives to one (big) new hard drive with out loosing any data.

For something like that, "/webs" would be just fine. For myself, I prefer to capitalize the first letter of a mount point that I made (this keeps me from confusing it with a directory). So "/webs" would become "/Webs".

For generic partitions I simply base my mount point off of the partition name. i.e. the "/dev/hdc5" partition would have a mount point of "/Hdc5" off of "/". The reason for this is that I generally have a least two different distros installed at any given time (currently it's SuSE 8.0 & SuSE 8.1, but my record is 4 distros and Win4Lin on the same box) and I need to keep my mount points straight so that I don't accidentally blow away something that I didn't mean to


John