Are these the only partitions you have?
I've never seen sda2 & 3 missing.
Everytime I've partitioned or deleted partition it was renamed to the previous partition #

@EDDY1 this is not the problem, please read post #29
Primary and extended partitions are numbered from 1-4 and logical partitions begin with 5. Logical partitions are created inside the extended partition and are useful if you want to have more than only four partitions.

@linux/unix87: when I told you to decrease the size of the big partition /dev/sda1 before creating an extended partition, I meant to make the free space big enough. I think you should decrease /dev/sda1 down to about 50GB, this will give you about 100GB of free space. For swap you'll need a maximum of 512MB, for LFS you'll need about 10GB of space. As I understood you're running Ubuntu on partition /dev/sda1, doesn't your Ubuntu have a separate partition for the /home folder?

Markus

I never decreased or increased anything thats the way its been since i installed it. Im wondering you guys said to use something other than the host to partition. could i use partition wizard it is a bootable cd? or do i have to use gparted? because i dont have gparted.

Well, you can burn the gparted iso-image: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php on a CD. You can boot it like any other Linux-live-CD and then decrease your /dev/sda1 partition. Afterwards you may delete /dev/sda4
and create a new extended partition.

Markus

oh and for the swap i have read and been told diff things on the size of that like: use 1 and half times your ram and 512mb and many others. also im trying to follow what the manual says on lfs it says i can use fdisk to create my partitions but the error its giving me is "no free sectors" so then i tried using an easier cfdisk but that says fatal error cannot open disk drive?

how big is the iso file cause if its the size of the distrobution download it would take me hours so would partition wizard work? nevermind im downloading it now

Well, fdisk cannot create partitions if there is no free space (space without a parition) left on the device. Don't confuse "free diskspace" and not "partitioned space".

With swap, you'll need as least as much swap as RAM if you want to hibernate.
Normally you'll need much less of swap. How many RAM do you have?

Markus

the iso has about 120MB. Be aware, that it is possible, if you already have an Ubuntu or Suse Live-CD or DVD, that there is gparted installed. You may boot the Live-CD and find this out. If you want to resize a partition, you'll have to use a live-CD since you cannot change a partition which is already mounted (which would be the case if you would use gparted when your Ubuntu is running).

Markus

i have 3 gb of ram. I downloaded gparted live and its on a cd in the computer so i downsize partition /dev/sda1 and then delete /devsda4? In what order ,if there is any, do you partition? ok so what if you unmount it because i was able to create a partition using fdisk while running ubuntu but i had to restart to actually mount it. oh another thing is there was unallocated space about 147gb but it wouldnt let me partition that at all?

No specific order.

gparted wont let me delete /dev/sda4? How can i do this?

If logica you have to delete the partitions inside first.
sda5

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so how big should i make /dev/sda2 extended? and how do i put the partitions in the extended from what im understanding cause i just figured out how to delete it. my swap was in the extended i deleted that then deleted partition 4.

You have to go back thru the post and look for information on that, I don't know anything about lfs, and use guided partitioning.
usually / has own partition and then all others are within extended(logical).
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html

ok an operating system needs three partitions right? home,extended,and swap. now when your doing say lfs you would need those partitions together right? also what goes in the extended?