No free space to install but there is free space?
 

I have an acer 5920G and am trying to install fedora 10 using the live cd.

Under disk management I have 4 partitions already.

2 EISA partitions which I assume are acer recovery partitions for the laptop.

The other 2 are 2 primary partitions. One is C which Windows Vista is on and the second is a Data partition also NTFS for data.

I shrank the data partition using WinVista disk management so that 25Gigs was free.

Then I put the Fedora 10 live cd in the drive and choose to boot from CD at startup.

Fedora 10 loaded fine and everything worked liked it should.

I then went to install fedora 10 by clicking the app in fedora. Once I got to the install in partitions part it wouldn't find any free space by selecting the install in free space.

I tried custom and it see's the free space. I then preceded to try and partition and format the free space and when I try to do that it again gives me an error saying there is no free space.

There is defintly free unformated space there but it won't use it for some reason. So my question is why isn't it able to use it and how can I install linux on my Acer 5920G laptop?

Is it because there is already 4 partitions and the EISA ones are also considered primary meaning I can't have any more primary partitions?

Or has acer locked everything some how?

Or is it the live cd?

Also does anyone have any advice on problems I'd run into using a boot loader. I heard it messes with the acer recovery if I ever needed it.

Thanks for the help

You can only have four primary partitions on a given hard drive. My guess is the two recovery partitions are primary types as well; they typically are on acers. That leaves no partitions that the installer can create on the unallocated space.

You need to create some logical partitions which requires that you have one primary partition to act as a container for those logical partitions. Logical partitions/volumes were invented to get around the four primary partition limit. What you need to do is back up your data on your data partition to another drive. Delete the data partition and recreate the partition as a logical partition instead of a primary partition. Copy your data back to this logical partition and then the installation should install on the unallocated space as it can now create logical partitions there for the installation.

Hello,

the name of the "container"-partition is extended-partition. Within the extended Partition you can create many logical partitions. You will need one logical partition to restore the backup of your data-partition and at least one paritition for linux. Be sure to look at the partition id of every partition, they are different for windows, linux and linux-swap. Depending on your RAM-size it will be a good decision to create a swap-partition as well, so you will create 3 logical parititions into the extended one.

Markus

Is it possible to delete the two EISA partitions without having any problems with vista?

I made a recvoery cd using acer's program so I imagine that I now don't need the recovery partitions.

So can I delete the 2 EISA partitions and then install linux and still have vista and linux working fine?

Thanks for the help everyone.

I don't know about how important the recovery-partitions are. If you delete them you will remain flexible in your partition-scheme with an extended partition. Delete the two partitions and create one extended partition instead. Then create one logical partition for swap (double of RAM-size) and one for / and one for /home.

Alright so I totally removed my data partition as I heard that removing the recovery would be very bad on my acer from a friend with an acer.

What I'm going to do is install linux on 30 gigs of the space and create another fat32 partition for other data.

Hopefully that will work :)

I got it all working :)

I deleted my D drive.
Formatted some free space and installed linux then formatted the remaining as an extended fat32 partition.