Fedora Installation Help

[Jamie23]

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.

 

[Jamie23]

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

 

[Jamie23]

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.

 

[Jamie23]

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

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

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.