I've just installed RH9, (very crispy!), but this is my first experience with linux. I want to run a dual boot with winXP, and I just got some bad news... fdisk won't let me create any more partitions!!! When I was installing RH, I had a problem creating a windows partition in Druid, so i left half the disk unallocated to partition with fdisk later. I created the boot partition, the swap, and the root partitions for linux. Now when I try to partition the remaining 50% of the disk in fdisk, it says that the max number of partitions has already been reached. I know you can run dual partitions, I'm just not sure what I've done wrong. Your help/suggestions are much appreciated, Thanks

Its easyer to install windows first, then linux second. Why don't you just put the windows xp disk in and use it to partion the rest of the disk, because you do want to make it dual boot. But as I know it, windows doesn't like being past the 1024 cylinder, or what is the boot area. So you might want to start over, use a windows 98 boot disk, and use fdisk to make your partions, where you want them. I guess you want to make a windows area, then a linux area, then a free space area to have as a storage space to share files between the operating systems. then load windows in the first area, linux in the next, and then in windows just format the last partion for sharing files. Find partition magic, and load it into windows, it helps a lot.

Yea. I would start over.... You can only have 3 primary partitions. The 4th has to be an extended partition. Then you can have as many logical volumes as you want... Sounds like you have one slot left for an extended partition tho. As brando mentioned, its easier to install Windows first if you want a dual boot. If I were you, I would start over. Install Xp on a new C drive. While you are making partitions in Xp, make a D and an E drive. Make D drive whatever size you want Red Hats root to be and make E drive whatever size you want your Linux swap to be. Then make an extended partition with the remaining space. boot partitions are kind of pointless too. Just make a root and swap. boot will get thrown on root. Once you get into disk druid, erase your place holders for root and swap and then make them again with disk druid. That way youll have Xp on the first primary partition, Red Hats root on the second and then Red Hats swap on the third. Making an Extended partition in fdisk with the remainder space will allow you to make a logical drive for a shared partition. Then you can mount the shared partition in Red Hat and it will also show up in Xp as D Drive. That is the most efficent use of hard drive space in my opinion. There are a billion and one ways to do it tho. 1.5 gb for 2k or Xp is plently 4 gb for RHs root is plenty. It only takes 1.8 for a personal desktop install tho whatever you want for your swap Then a shared partition that both can read and write to.....FAT32 Thats how I work it.... Give it a whirl and decide if you like it. I must have formatted my hard drive and redid dual boots atleast Ten times before I found something that I liked.....

The mistake was to use disk-druid. Use Fdisk at this step and you are in control. The partition table can hold only 4 slots, that can be all primary partitions or one of them would be an extended partition. You can put quite a number of "logical" partitions into the extended partition (I think I had once 7 logical partitions). Check in linux with fdisk -l /dev/hd? If you are lucky and the highest one is the swap partition you can fix it the simple way: disable swap (comment it out in /etc/fstab), start linux without swap, use fdisk to delete the swap partition, create an extended partition over the rest of the drive, create a logical partition and make it swap, create another logical partition make it "b" (FAT32, when you install XP there lateron it will ask you to change it to NTFS anyway).

< SNIP > boot partitions are kind of pointless too < /SNIP > I personally use a small (less than 100Mb) partition at the beginning of the disk for /boot. The advantage is that it only needs to be read on boot and therefore doesn't need to be mounted for everyday use. If the system crashes and corrupts my filesystem it won't damage my kernel etc