Try reading the Partitioning MINI HOWTO manual. If I am right I remember
reading that the hard-disk in Intel based system cannot take more than four
primary+extended partitions. Logical partitions can be as many as you want,
but they are placed within extended partitions. So in your setup, the MS
Windows takes up a primary partition, an extended partition and a logical
partition within the extended partition. This means that in Linux you can
allocate two primary partitions or one primary and one extended partition.
Since you exhaust all the two remaining primary partitions with the Linux
root and linux swap, you are unable to make any more partitions. If you
remove the extended partition from MSWindows, you will be able to allocate
logical partitions for /usr, /home and whatever else.
Ok here is the relevant section from the MINI-HOWTO for partitioning......
"2.2. Device numbers and device names
The number of partitions on an Intel based system was limited from the
very beginning: The original partition table was installed as part of
the boot sector and held space for only four partition entries. These
partitions are now called primary partitions. When it became clear
that people needed more partitions on their systems, logical
partitions were invented. The number of logical partitions is not
limited: Each logical partition contains a pointer to the next logical
partition, so you can have a potentially unlimited chain of partition
entries.
For compatibility reasons, the space occupied by all logical
partitions had to be accounted for. If you are using logical
partitions, one primary partition entry is marked as "extended
partition" and its starting and ending block mark the area occupied by
your logical partitions. This implies that the space assigned to all
logical partitions has to be contiguous. There can be only one
extended partition: no fdisk program will create more than one
extended partition.
Linux cannot handle more than a limited number of partitions per
drive. So in Linux you have 4 primary partitions (3 of them useable,
if you are using logical partitions) and at most 15 partitions
altogether on an SCSI disk (63 altogether on an IDE disk)."
Vilas Kumar C
----- Original Message -----
From: "rahul" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> hi,
> i tried to install linux on my friends computer who has a 4.3 gb hd with
> windows on a 2.5 gb primary partition and another dos partition of .5 gb
> as extended .now the 1 gb is left unpartioned and i tried installing
> linux on it whenever i try to make partions of root ,swap,etc it
> allocates them first but as soon as i try and create the 3rd partion fer
> any other thing it comes out as ..
> system was unable to allocate / partition..the reason given 'primary not
> free'!!!
> i hav been unable to understand it pls clarify.....
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