Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 5485
Cannot Install RH 6.x on Hard Drive despite 4 gigs of unpartitioned space
Last modified: 2015-01-07 18:38:17 EST
The bug is in disk druid AND in fdisk. I have a 25 gig IBM hard drive. There are currently 2 win98 fat 32 partitions on it, both 10 gig apiece. That left me wiht roughly 5 gig or so. When I went to create a / partition in the installer, it told me that there was not enough space to do the partitioning. The same error occured when trying to make a /boot partition. Changing the size of the attempt was ineffectual. Then I tried creating a /usr partition of 3 gig. It worked. I tried / again, to no avail. This is not the first machine i have experienced this problem on.
The problem is that Disk Druid will not allow you to create /boot or root (depending on whether /boot is present) above the 1024 cylinder limit, as then it is not bootable. This is a safety feature to prevent people installing above 1024 cylinders and then not being able to boot their installations. The workaround is to use fdisk to create the partitions that you would like to create and then assign them in Disk Druid. Keep in mind that you will need a boot disk in order to boot the system, as lilo will not be able to see the boot partition this high up in the cylinders.