Fedora Installation Help

Jamie23 · 2 Nov 2010 at 00:42

Hello, trying to install Fedora 13 using my usb memory stick and have ran into several problems.

I'm trying to dual boot it with windows 7 so inside windows I partition'ed the hard drive so that i now have 114gb of unallocated space. When trying to install off the usb I select my hard drive as the "install target device" and my memory stick automatically is a "data storage device". However when i try to go ahead with this I'm told:

"Could not allocate requested partitions: not enough free space on disks".

I'm taken to a partitioning screen where i select the free space and hit next only to be told:

"You have not defined a root partition (/), which is required for installation of Fedora to continue.
You have not created a /boot/efi partition."

I have tried to create a standard partition on the same screen where the mount point is "/boot" but i'm told there is "not enough free space on the disks".

So any idea what I'm doing wrong? Having only dabbled in ubuntu before i'm really very inexperienced with linux so apologies if this is trivial.

AndrewP · 2 Nov 2010 at 14:42

That's the same way I've got Fedora installed with Windows, so it definitely works

. Selecting the devices sounds normal, but you may have to allocate the partitions manually - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Installation_Guide/s1-diskpartsetup-x86.html - and check out the partitioning scheme recommendations for a guideline (a separate /home partition can save headaches if upgrading in the future, for example)

Might be worth trying a DVD installation rather than USB to rule that out as a cause too.

Jamie23 · 2 Nov 2010 at 19:41

Did you install through usb?

I've tried several times to add a partition on the free space, i'm selecting:
Mount point = "/boot"
File System Type: "ext4"
Allowable drives = hard drive and memory stick
size = 10000mb

and i keep getting told "Could not allocate requested patitions: not enough free space on disks", despite me selecting the 115494mb space

Essexraptor · 3 Nov 2010 at 08:33

When selecting your target drive I assume you are moving it with arrows to the right hand pane and selecting the drive as per the link below?

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US...llation_Guide/Assign_Storage_Devices-x86.html

If still no joy, try looking at these 2 links dependent on how or where you want your grub to be located

http://thpc.info/dual/win7/dualboot_win7+fedora13_grub_lnx_on_win7.html

http://thpc.info/dual/win7/dualboot_win7+fedora13_bcd_on_win7.html

note that a standard partition is just / not /boot
allow 2gb for your swap partition and not the 1gb suggested in these links

dlmalloc · 3 Nov 2010 at 17:46

Isn't Fedora 14 out now? Try that instead...

Jamie23 · 3 Nov 2010 at 23:02

Ok thanks, had a look at getting fedora 14 but it seems i'm having trouble downloading it or else their website isn't working correctly.

Thanks for the link Essexraptor, I'll give it another go and hopefully it works.

AndrewP · 3 Nov 2010 at 23:12

Fedora 14 was release yesterday I think, so the download sites will still be busy probably - may be worth getting that as it will give newer packages and an extra 6 months of updates over 13. I installed from DVD, would suggest removing the USB stick from the allowable drives when installing, it sounds to me like the insufficient space error is because the USB drive is (presumably) <10GB which you were selecting for /boot. /boot doesn't really need to be more than a few hundred MB, incidentally - it's only got a few core files to store on there.

memyselfandi · 4 Nov 2010 at 07:31

Jamie23 said:
Did you install through usb?

I've tried several times to add a partition on the free space, i'm selecting:
Mount point = "/boot"
File System Type: "ext4"
Allowable drives = hard drive and memory stick
size = 10000mb

and i keep getting told "Could not allocate requested patitions: not enough free space on disks", despite me selecting the 115494mb space

Erm, /boot shouldn't be anywhere near 10GB. Make /boot ~512MB (at most) and then assign the rest of the space you were going to assign to it to the / (root) mount point. I also probably wouldn't use ext4 for /boot either, it wouldn't really gain you anything on that small a partition with /boot's usage profile and is new enough that it could introduce issues. If you want to use ext4 then make /boot ext2 and / ext4.

Jamie23 · 9 Nov 2010 at 19:06

Tried all the advice and pages shown in the thread, still couldn't get any where so tried a different distribution (mint) and I had it installed from usb within 20 minutes

.

I'm only using Linux to practice for a module we're currently studying in uni, where it's just learning to use Linux from command line so I'm guessing the commands are pretty much common to all the distributions.

Thanks for the advice, really appreciate it

AndrewP said:
Fedora 14 was release yesterday I think, so the download sites will still be busy probably - may be worth getting that as it will give newer packages and an extra 6 months of updates over 13. I installed from DVD, would suggest removing the USB stick from the allowable drives when installing, it sounds to me like the insufficient space error is because the USB drive is (presumably) <10GB which you were selecting for /boot. /boot doesn't really need to be more than a few hundred MB, incidentally - it's only got a few core files to store on there.

Yea I think you're right about the usb being the problem. Problem was I couldn't de-select it from the allowable drives. I thought just mounting it instead of having it as a data drive would solve that, but it didn't

memyselfandi said:
Erm, /boot shouldn't be anywhere near 10GB. Make /boot ~512MB (at most) and then assign the rest of the space you were going to assign to it to the / (root) mount point. I also probably wouldn't use ext4 for /boot either, it wouldn't really gain you anything on that small a partition with /boot's usage profile and is new enough that it could introduce issues. If you want to use ext4 then make /boot ext2 and / ext4.

Yea I only set it to that amount to show that the hard drive space was not the problem. Thanks for the advice on partitioning, I'll keep that in mind for the next time.