[KLUG Members] Trying to partition drive

[Adam Williams]

>Evening all...

Morning!

>I have a quick couple of questions.  (I am VERY green at Linux - just 
>starting to load it again to play/learn)
>I am trying to load Red Hat 7.2 on either one of the two machines I have.  
>Both have had this exact version loaded before and since have been formated 
>to something different for whatever reason.  Currently I am using the "Have 
>the installer automatically partition for you" option at the Disk Partition 
>Setup" (I am not to the point that I know how to do this myself) and I am 
>getting the same error everytime I try.  The error "Could not allocate 
>requested partitions: Partitioning failed: Could not allocate paritions as 
>primary partitions.".   One of my first thoughts is my drive is bad, but I 
>have several 1 - 4 drives floating around and they all did the same thing 
>(even tried a 20 gig).  Then I thought it might be the computer so I put 
>together another machine and got the same results. (first is a PIII 800 
>512megs ram the second is a Celeron 766 w/256 megs of ram (its cheap!) 
>standard WD, Seagate Maxtor drives.)
>Any one have any suggestions why this is happening?  I have found a couple 
>osts at different boards about the problem but no answers why and what to do 
>about it.
>If we do not know the answer how about suggestions how to partition the 
>1.2gig 1.6gig and/or 2.1gig drives I have..  Some ideas and why you suggest 
>this layout.

Perhaps the drives are already partitioned (no un-allocated space)?  As
I recall, the auto-partitioner won't removed a pre-existant partition. 
You can "maually" remove the partitions,  then start over and let it
carve up the drive automagically.