Hello. I'm a potential new user, but I'm having trouble with the install. I have Windows and Leap on one of the new on-board drives, and I have added /dev/sda, a new Samsung 465 GiB ssd (ordinary type) to the system. I formatted it to ext4 using GParted, and it's empty except for 8.38 GiB at the beginning that GParted must have added. When I try to add theFedora system to this, it says there is only 1.2 GiB available. I went back and ran GParted on it again, but it still comes up the same way. What am I doing wrong? Or is the drive defective? GParted doesn't complain about it. Thans for your assistance--doug
On Wed, 2021-09-01 at 01:23 -0400, Douglas McGarrett wrote:
Hello. I'm a potential new user, but I'm having trouble with the install. I have Windows and Leap on one of the new on-board drives, and I have added /dev/sda, a new Samsung 465 GiB ssd (ordinary type) to the system. I formatted it to ext4 using GParted, and it's empty except for 8.38 GiB at the beginning that GParted must have added. When I try to add theFedora system to this, it says there is only 1.2 GiB available. I went back and ran GParted on it again, but it still comes up the same way. What am I doing wrong? Or is the drive defective? GParted doesn't complain about it. Thans for your assistance--doug
Hi,
Based on information you provided and how I understand it. Anaconda (Fedora's installer) doesn't see new disk as free space, which is expected when you said you formated it with ext4 filesystem. To be able to use it, you would need to use custom option to set it as mount point and re-format it, or use reclaim space option, which will allow you to delete that partition and re-create a partition(s) layout as suggested by the installer.
Installer would only see that as free space if there is no partitions with filesystems on it. Even if there is a filesystem with "no data" on it, it's still not seen as free space.
You can find more details in [1].
Regards, Branko
[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f34/install-guide/install/Instal...
On Wed, 2021-09-01 at 01:23 -0400, Douglas McGarrett wrote:
I have added /dev/sda, a new Samsung 465 GiB ssd (ordinary type) to the system. I formatted it to ext4 using GParted, and it's empty except for 8.38 GiB at the beginning that GParted must have added. When I try to add theFedora system to this, it says there is only 1.2 GiB available. I went back and ran GParted on it again, but it still comes up the same way. What am I doing wrong? Or is the drive defective? GParted doesn't complain about it.
I suppose the "only 1.2 gig available" is confusing. That's some unallocated part of the drive. Everything that you prepared and formatted its ignoring as already for use by something else (it doesn't know they're blank, it's just looking at existing partitions as not free for it to use).
I haven't played with the latest installation yet, but the prior install routines didn't need you to prepare a drive first, and I'd expect the current one to be the same. You can go back to Gparted, erase your partitions, and make the drive "empty," then install Fedora.
If you like to specify partition sizes yourself, you should get the chance to do so during the Fedora install. Or, it should be possible to pick prepared partitions, but you might have to hunt around a bit to find where manual partitioning is hidden.
On 9/1/21 4:58 AM, Tim via users wrote:
On Wed, 2021-09-01 at 01:23 -0400, Douglas McGarrett wrote:
I have added /dev/sda, a new Samsung 465 GiB ssd (ordinary type) to the system. I formatted it to ext4 using GParted, and it's empty except for 8.38 GiB at the beginning that GParted must have added. When I try to add theFedora system to this, it says there is only 1.2 GiB available. I went back and ran GParted on it again, but it still comes up the same way. What am I doing wrong? Or is the drive defective? GParted doesn't complain about it.
I suppose the "only 1.2 gig available" is confusing. That's some unallocated part of the drive. Everything that you prepared and formatted its ignoring as already for use by something else (it doesn't know they're blank, it's just looking at existing partitions as not free for it to use).
I haven't played with the latest installation yet, but the prior install routines didn't need you to prepare a drive first, and I'd expect the current one to be the same. You can go back to Gparted, erase your partitions, and make the drive "empty," then install Fedora.
If you like to specify partition sizes yourself, you should get the chance to do so during the Fedora install. Or, it should be possible to pick prepared partitions, but you might have to hunt around a bit to find where manual partitioning is hidden.
I may not have indicated that I already have two systems on the new-type disk. I want to be sure to keep them. The "new" old-type disk is known to the existing Linux as /dev/sda. So I just went to gparted again and erased whatever was on sda, and gparted made me have a partition, so I made the whole drive a partition and formatted it as fat32, which is probably the way it came from the factory. Is this OK? I'll wait for an answer before proceeding. Thanx--doug
On Wed, 2021-09-01 at 15:04 -0400, Douglas McGarrett wrote:
I may not have indicated that I already have two systems on the new- type disk. I want to be sure to keep them. The "new" old-type disk is known to the existing Linux as /dev/sda. So I just went to gparted again and erased whatever was on sda, and gparted made me have a partition, so I made the whole drive a partition and formatted it as fat32, which is probably the way it came from the factory. Is this OK? I'll wait for an answer before proceeding.
You're back at square one, about to do the same thing.
If you create a partition and format it (whatever filesystem you format it with), the Linux installer sees that space as used and unavailable (whether, or not, there is any data in that partition), and will want to use something else to install to.
New hard drives do not come formatted.
If you're sharing the drive with other installations, then do not erase the whole drive - you'll remove those other installation. Remove the spare partition you made, leave that part of the drive empty. Do not create a new partition, do not do any formatting. Leave the space unused.
If you're not sharing the drive with anything else, do that to the entire drive.
Gparted does not make you create partitions. Sure it might prompt you to make one as the next step, but you don't have to.
On 9/1/2021 11:39 PM, Tim via users wrote:
If you create a partition and format it (whatever filesystem you format it with), the Linux installer sees that space as used and unavailable (whether, or not, there is any data in that partition), and will want to use something else to install to.
New hard drives do not come formatted.
If you're sharing the drive with other installations, then do not erase the whole drive - you'll remove those other installation. Remove the spare partition you made, leave that part of the drive empty. Do not create a new partition, do not do any formatting. Leave the space unused.
If you're not sharing the drive with anything else, do that to the entire drive.
Gparted does not make you create partitions. Sure it might prompt you to make one as the next step, but you don't have to.
Thank you. That's exactly clear and what I needed to know. I've been playing in the
Linux world for quite a while, and this is the first time I ran into this situation.
--doug
On Wed, 2021-09-01 at 21:34 +0100, Douglas McGarrett wrote:
On 9/1/2021 11:39 PM, Tim via users wrote:
If you create a partition and format it (whatever filesystem you format it with), the Linux installer sees that space as used and unavailable (whether, or not, there is any data in that partition), and will want to use something else to install to.
New hard drives do not come formatted.
If you're sharing the drive with other installations, then do not erase the whole drive - you'll remove those other installation. Remove the spare partition you made, leave that part of the drive empty. Do not create a new partition, do not do any formatting. Leave the space unused.
If you're not sharing the drive with anything else, do that to the entire drive.
Gparted does not make you create partitions. Sure it might prompt you to make one as the next step, but you don't have to.
Thank you. That's exactly clear and what I needed to know. I've been playing in the
Linux world for quite a while, and this is the first time I ran into this situation.
On the other hand, if you want to create your own partitioning scheme, it is possible to do that too. You can create the partitions you want, either prior to starting the installer, or after by switching to the shell prompt. If you do want to create a custom parititioning scheme, then you have to assign those partitions to each file system (/, /usr, /tmp, /var, /home, etc.) during the disk part of the install process manually. I would point out this is not well documented, or at least I have not found good documentation, I just had to play around with it to figure it out. Probably only useful for experienced admins.
On Wed, 1 Sept 2021 at 22:35, Douglas McGarrett dmcgarrett@optonline.net wrote:
Linux world for quite a while, and this is the first time I ran into this situation.
Yes. Other distros let you choose which partition gets reformatted. My installs of Fedora have been on systems with Windows installed, where I shrink the Windows partition and use the free space, or installs to new disks where I don't do any preparation, just run the installer. Recently, however, I installed Fedora on an SSD pulled from a Windows system and hit the "no space" issue. I just removed the existing partitions with Disks in the Live System and ran the installer again.
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Branko Grubić -
C Linus Hicks -
Douglas McGarrett -
George N. White III -
Tim