Installing RHL7.2 with EZ-BIOS overlay

[insanity]

Hi.
I"ve had a problem with installing Red Hat Linux 7.2 on my PII, 333Mhz (288MB RAM). I installed a new hard disk, a 40GB Western Digital Caviar. As I had an old BIOS that didn't allow me to see all 40GB, I used the EZ-Bios overlay. My machines running Win2k with dedicated 30 Gig partitioned into two drives. I left out 8GB of unallocated space for linux.
Now when installing it, I can't select "Automatic Partitioning"; it says "Inconsistent Free Space".,. and switches me over to Disk Druid. Looking at the disk details in Druid, there is some minute free space (<1 MB) just before my window partitions C and D. So my first question is
a) How come these pockets of free space?
When partitioning the free space into swap (300MB - hda4), /boot (54MB - hda3) it works but with some warnings. But when I'm committing the rest of the 8Gig to /root, I get the error "Could not allocate requested Partitions. Unable to create partition which extends beyond the end of the disk"... HUH!?? The space is there, I can see on Disk Druid, but can't allocate my /root partition.
b) So what am I doing wrong? And is it necessary to put the /boot partition on hda1? Thats already taken up with Win2k.
Would be very grateful for any help coming thru..,.. thanx a lot
-Insanity

[problemchild]

When partitioning the free space into swap (300MB - hda4), /boot (54MB - hda3) it works but with some warnings

You're out of partitions. You can only have 4 primary partitions on a disk. You'll need to let the 4th one be extended and create logical partitions in it. You can let hda3 be swap and put your Linux stuff in hda5, hda6, hda7, etc....

[insanity]

Ah.. thanx a lot pc, but.., umm., my windows partition 'D' on hda2, is already an extended type.
Still.. using disk druid how do I force a partition to be extended?? Theres no checkbox or any such option where one could choose if the partition was to be primary or extended. So how do I go about doing this? I even tried using fdisk that comes along with linux, but when selecting "Create Extended Partition", it can't find the unallocated memory.
thanx again for ur help..

[rcgreen]

You will have to delete an existing partition in order
to create an extended partition.

The partition table has fields for only four entries.
Delete one of those partitions. Then create a linux
extended partition. Within it, you can create up to four
logical partitions.

BTW, the empty space before the first partition is
probably due to EZ-BIOS. It should not be a problem.

The LILO bootloader requires /boot (which contains the kernel)
to be before the 1024th cylinder of the hard drive, because
it uses a BIOS call to access and load the kernel into
memory at boot time. If you use GRUB, this limitation should
not be an issue.

[problemchild]

The LILO bootloader requires /boot (which contains the kernel) to be before the 1024th cylinder of the hard drive, because it uses a BIOS call to access and load the kernel into memory at boot time.

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that limitation in lilo was overcome quite a while back. I spent some time on Google trying to find the exact version that it changed, but the best I could find was this. From the Mandrake 7.1 (June 13, 2000) release notes:

# The Grub user-friendly bootloader is now provided as default. LILO is an optional bootloader in an "Expert" install. Both Grub and LILO now overcome the 1024-cylinder limit.

http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/pr-helium.php3

[insanity]

thanx rcgreen. ... will delete the partition.. and try to see if I can get Linux working. But rite now., its 3 am.. me gonna get some sleep.., do that in the morning..
thanx again.,
-insanity