partioning problem

[Konstantinos Boboridis]

ÃåéÜ óáò!
Ðñïóðáèþ íá åãêáôáóôÞóù ôï RedHat Linux 9 óôï laptop ìïõ. ¸÷ù üìùò Þäç 
êïëëÞóåé óôï ðñþôï óôÜäéï ôçò åãêáôÜóôáóçò ëüãù êÜðïéïõ ðñïâëÞìáôïò ìå ôá 
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øÜ÷íïíôáò ðåñéóóüôåñï âñÞêá ôéò åëëçíéêÝò óåëßäåò ðåñß Linux. ÓôÝëíù ëïéðüí 
ôï ßäéï ìÞíõìá (óôá áããëéêÜ) êáé óå óáò, åëðßæïíôáò üôé êÜðïéïò èá ìðïñÝóåé 
íá ìå âïçèÞóåé.

Íôßíïò

I am trying to install Red Hat Linux 9 on my laptop (Compaq Presario 
X1000). I have the Publisher's Edition of Red Hat Linux 9 (2 CD's) that 
came with a book I bought a few months ago. Using VCOM's Partition 
Commander (version 8), I partitioned my 40GB drive into a 6GB ntfs 
partition for WinXP, a 25GB extended partition with three fat32 logical 
partitions (one for Windows applications, and two for data) and left about 
6GB of free space at the end in order to install Linux.
However, there seems to be a problem with my partition scheme. During the 
Linux installation, when I get to the 'Disk Partitioning Setup' screen and 
choose to use Disk Druid I get the following message:

Warning
The partition table on /dev/hda in incosistent. There are many reasons why 
this might be the case. Often, the reason is that Linux detected the BIOS 
geometry incorrectly. However, this does not appear to be the case here. It 
is safe to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixablle) problems with some 
boot loaders, and may cause problems with FAT file systems. Using LBA is 
recommended.

When I ignore the message to continue the installation, I see the following 
table:

Device         Start   End   Size    Type
/dev/hda
   Free space       1     1      0M   Free space
   /dev/hda1        1   784   6142M   ntfs
   /dev/hda2      784  4048  25603M   Extended
     Free space   784   784      0M   Free space
     /dev/hda5    784  2480  13311M   vfat
     Free space  2481  2481      0M   Free space
     /dev/hda6   2481  3394   7168M   vfat
     Free space  3394  3394      0M   Free space
     /dev/hda7   3394  4048   5123M   vfat
   Free space    4048  4864   6408M   Free space


In the next step, I try to create a new (root) partition in the free space 
(the one starting at 4048) with the following settings in the 'Add 
Partition' screen:

Mount Point: /
File System Type: ext3
Size (MB): 4096
(*) Fixed Size


I get the following warning:
Boot partition / may not meet booting conastraints for your architecture. 
Creation of a boot disk is highly recommended.

At this point I abort the installation.

I tried to create first the swap partition (which worked) and then the root 
partition (/) but received the following error message:

Error partitioning: Could not allocate requested partition: Partitioning 
failed: Could not allocate partitions.

Is there really something wrong with the partitions on my drive or am I 
doing something wrong during the installation? I aì complete novice in 
things concerning partitions, Linux etc.