Hi guys.
I'm currently running slackware, but wanted to test out another distro for comparison side by side (gentoo or debian). The only space I had was on my ntfs partition, so I used partition magic to make an empty partition, but now when I do an fdisk p, it won't show up. I started the Debian beta installer (which I've tried succesfully before), and it sees the unused space as unuseable.
I've heard about partition magic being terrible for creating linux partitions, but it skipped my mind at the time, but it's not formated, just empty space.
Anyone have any ideas on where I should go from there, I'll try adding the empty space to my ntfs again but I'm not sure if thats going to work.

Thank you
Dswissmiss

You could try another program like cfdisk and see if it acts the same. Off of the top of my head I wonder if it is not showing up because being empty there is no partion to display. If that is the case you can try to create a new partition, and see if it prompts you for the starting cylinder (of the free space) or if it tells you there is no available space to make the partition.

fdisk n tells me: No free sectors available

and cfdisk gives me:
FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive
Press any key to exit cfdisk

I also tried to install qparted, but then it tells me to install parted, then tells me to install lib something, then when I do make for qparted it can't find anything...anyone know how to get qparted onto slackware?

thank you

You could try another program like cfdisk and see if it acts the same. Off of the top of my head I wonder if it is not showing up because being empty there is no partion to display. If that is the case you can try to create a new partition, and see if it prompts you for the starting cylinder (of the free space) or if it tells you there is no available space to make the partition.

ok, I finally got qtparted to work and made a new reiserfs partiton with it, but since it came out of an extended ntfs partition, it still shows up as extended.

fdisk shows this:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 1020 8193118+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdb2 1021 8797 62468752+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdb3 8798 8861 514080 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdb4 * 8862 9729 6972210 83 Linux
/dev/hdb5 1021 7801 54468351 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdb6 7802 8797 8000338+ 83 Linux

I have windows on hdb1, ntfs files on hdb5 and slackware on hdb4.

I remember reading something about the posibility of having a certain number of primary partitions, is this why? Will I have any problems installing another distro on hdb6 even though its extended?

Thank you
Dswissmiss

No problem installing linux into an extended partition.

The very first PC hard drives could only have 4 partitions. This became a limitation once capacities became larger and so the extended partition was developed. The original 4 are now known as primary and the additional drives known as logicals. I assume the reason for doing this was for backward compatability.
Primary partitions IDs 1-4
Logical partitions IDs >=5