how not to initialize HD

[JB]

Paul Cartwright <ale <at> pcartwright.com> writes:

> ...
> Fedora 13 live cd
> > Solution.
> > To fix the above issue, you should correct the present disk layout. You can
> >  perform this by removing all the existing partitions and creating new
> > ones.
> not sure if that is possible. Live cd doesn't see any partitions using 
> gparted. running ubuntu you can't change the sda3 extended partition, because 
> it is mounted.. Not sure if windows will change an extended partition 
> size....
> 
Paul,
I just started my f13 live cd on my second notebook. I would suggest forget
gparted for now (except that you learned that the same utility sees different
things on different distros ...).

I started 'fdisk /dev/sda' on my live cd, selected extended partition for
deletion (it was accepted), but of course I stopped before hitting 'w' for
writing the change permanently. I assume I could finalize it if I wanted.

So, because we removed sda7 and sda8, your hardisk should looke like:
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
  /dev/sda1   *           1        4462    35840983+   7  HPFS/NTFS
  /dev/sda3            4718       12162    59793409    5  Extended
  Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
  /dev/sda5            4718        5961     9989120   83  Linux
  /dev/sda6            5962        8094    17133291   83  Linux 

so there is an unallocated space below sda6 and theoretically fedora installer
should not complain about no space available, right ? We did more than what
Gregory suggested to do with the reallocation of spaces between sda6/7/8 .

How about really firing off your f13 live cd, checking for youself 'fdisk -l'
and 'fdisk /dev/sda' but ignoring writing the changes as I did above,
starting Installation to Harddisk trying out the installer and seeing if
the harddisk is yours to rearrange all space below your Win XP which you do
not want to touch right now ? You can always interrupt installer and back off
to think what you really want.
 
You can consider nuking everything except Win XP partition and then organize
it properly for the next 10 years or so ... with smartly preallocated
primary partitions and the extended one.
Somehaow I hope that this would get rid of that cfdisk error message as well.

Try it and tell us what happened and what you are up to if you wish.
JB