Howdy,

I just dual-booted my WinXP laptop with Fedora Core 3, and all is going swimmingly. However, I left about 1.5gb of unpartitioned space when I installed FC3 to create a fat32 partition that FC3 and WinXP could share. For some reason, the FC3 installer let me create the 1.5 gb "gap," but not partition it. I booted linux rescue CD 3.1 and tried qtparted, parted, and the like, to no avail. My own FC3 parted won't let me do it either (even in rescue mode). They all give nondescript error messages. Here's my fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 3647 29294496 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 3648 3660 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 3661 4574 7341705 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 4768 4864 779152+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 4768 4864 779121 82 Linux swap

Notice that there is a big gap between the end of hda3 and the beginning of hda4...that's my space that is, so to speak, lost in space.

I fear I have mangled my partition tables, since this seems like it should be a straightforward operation. But everything otherwise works just fine...I just can't set up that one partition.

Thanks!

Bob

haloooooooooo

just playing with my disk. and tried to put FreeBSD, and learned that u can have ONLY four partitions in ur disk. for more u can use extended. I have 8 partitions. 3 primary and 1 extended with five logical in it. total 4.

cheeeers

You can only create 4 primary partitions (including the extended). Even though you have unallocated space you can not create another partition.

If you move the starting space of the extended partition to include the unallocated space you should be able to create a logical partition.

Bingo. Will give it a shot...many thanks!

Bob

So I resized the expanded partition and created a fat32 logical partition inside it, and all's well--I can see it and write to it from linux and xp. Thanks for your help.

Bob