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If you try to install Fedora 16 to a hard disk with plenty of disk space, but 4 primary partitions, the partitioning step always fails saying there's not enough disk space. The error message is wrong, since the actual problem is that one partition has to be removed to create an extended partition. This can be a common scenario, since some laptop manufacturers (HP in my case) ship their disks with 4 primary partitions (which is arguably silly). It would be good to report a correct error message, as I thought Anaconda was completely buggy until I discovered the real problem. (I had to remove one of the partitions, and it worked fine after that.)
The error message isn't really wrong, depending on what partitioning method you chose. If you chose autopart, there's not enough space. You need to make some more space first. If you chose to use free space, this is still the case.
(In reply to comment #1) > You need to make some more space first. Of course, what's what I had done. I had shrunk one of the partitions so that 400GB were free. It's just that 4 primary partitions existed next to this free space, so autopart failed. The problem is also visible when doing manual partitioning: shrink one of the partitions to get these free 400GB, and try to create a new partition. You get an error message about lack of free space, while you actually just told the partitioning tool to free the required space. The tool itself is confused, since it suggests a default size for the new partition that corresponds to the free space, and yet fails when you click OK.
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Created attachment 696300 [details] screenshot showing "not enough free space on disks" when there are four primary partitions Reproduced with the F18 installer (anaconda-18.37.11-1.fc18). When there are four primary partitions, yet there is plenty of free space, the F18 installer displays the misleading error message: "not enough free space on disks". Procedure: 1. $ qemu-img create f18-test-4.img 40G 2. Use gparted to create four 1000 MiB primary partitions formatted as ext4. 3. Boot the installer DVD and proceed to Manual Partitioning. 4. Expand New Fedora 18 Installation. 5. Click "Click here to create them automatically." The installer displays this message: "not enough free space on disks". Yet the installer reports that there is 36.95 GB available space. See attached screenshot. Tested with: $ qemu-kvm -m 2048 -hda f18-test-1.img -hdb f18-test-4.img -cdrom ~/xfr/fedora/F18/Fedora-18-x86_64-DVD.iso -vga qxl -boot menu=on -usbdevice mouse
Created attachment 696301 [details] screenshot showing detailed gparted error message when there are four primary partitions When gparted cannot create an extended partition, because there are four primary partitions, it displays this detailed error message.
Fedora 16 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2013-02-12. Fedora 16 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.
Still valid in F18 after Anaconda rewrite. See above to reproduce it with a VM.
Still a problem with F19, in addition it stops displaying the resize/custom dialog so there is no alternative but to reboot.
In F20 you can use the reclaim dialog to delete one of the partitions without it locking up so I think this is as good as it needs to be. I'm going to close this now, there isn't anything automatic we can do -- shrinking just changes the filesystem size -- we still cannot convert it to an extended partition without removing it.
A clear error message would help too. How are people supposed to understand that "not enough free space" means "cannot create a new partition"?