Only 4 partitions available after resizing drive with XP on it

[Karl Larsen]

Nigel Henry wrote:
> As it's quite this afternoon, I thought I'd ask this question, as it's a bit 
> puzzling to me.
>
> A while back as I'd run out of available harddrive space for new FC versions, 
> I resized the original harddrive from this machine that had XP preinstalled 
> on it, using the gparted live cd, and it went like clockwork. XP with 12GB, 
> and the rest was now free space.
>
> Next I install Kubuntu on the drive, giving it a /, and a /home partition, let 
> it have half of the freespace, as I also wanted somewhere for another 
> instance of FC5. For some reason custom partitioning named the partitions as 
> hda5, and hda6 for / , and /home respectively, and Kubuntu didn't ask, and I 
> couldn't find a way to make a swap partition. No problem as there is 1GB of 
> RAM on the machine. So far so good. Grub's in the MBR, and both Kubuntu, and 
> that other OS bootup ok.
>
> Now it gets confusing.
>
> I go to install FC5, again with custom partitioning as I always do, and create 
> a / partition of 9GB. No problem. Next create a /home partition of 4GB, and 
> again no problem. Now I try to create a swap partition, and get a complaint 
> about not enough partitioning space, or something like that, even though 
> there is just on 1GB of harddrive space available.
>
> Now I remove the 4GB home partition, and try to create the swap partition 
> again. This time no problem, and I have an 800MB swap partition. Now I try to 
> recreate the /home partition (4GB, and enough space), but again a no-go, and 
> a complaint about not enough partitioning space/no partitions available.
>
> Ok. I'm not too bothered about the swap, so I remove the swap partition, and 
> use all the available free space to recreate the /home partition, put Grub in 
> the / partition for FC5, and some time later after editing 
> Kubuntu's /boot/grub/grub.conf, adding a chainloader to FC5's root partition, 
> all 3 OS's boot ok.
>
> The confusing bit is the available partitions. XP has got hda1, Kubuntu has 
> got hda5, and hda6, and FC5 has got hda3, and hda4. Quite why Kubuntu was 
> given hda5, and 6 when it was installed 1st, and FC5 was given hda3, and hda4 
> I don't know, but either way it would appear (leaving out XP from the 
> equation) that there are only 4 available partitions left on this drive for 
> Linux.
>
> I've probably done something wrong somewhere, but can anyone shed any light on 
> this confusing problem.
>
> Your Saturday afternoon puzzler posted from Northern France. Weather cloudy 
> but dry, 70°F, if I've done the C to F correctly in my head. Very light 
> breeze, and with a beer in my hand, sitting in the cellar looking out on the 
> back yard, all in all a nice afternoon. (UTC+2)
>
> Nigel.
>
>   
    Hi Nigel, never allow any OS to choose what partition it wants. 
Fedora always wants to do it for you and I stop that. Use # fdisk 
/dev/hda to see what you have really. And if it is as bad as it sounds I 
would make the partitions with fdisk and then make the OS fit in them. 
Do not mess with windows however :-)

Karl