Quote Originally Posted by garrincha
O.k. I actually took back my machine to the shop where it originally came from, ..... this is the info displayed:
Part-----Status------Type-------MB---Sys
C: 1-----A---------PRI DOS---4110---FAT32
Well, that change be the shop is your problem. You now have a C partition that takes up all of the 4 gig hard drive and no space for Linux partition.

I sure hope that the shop didn't charge you anything to do this (although I suspect that they did). At the current price of 25 to 33 cents a gig of mid-size IDE hard drives you could have bought a lot of extra hard drive for not much money, which would have been far better than paying for mucking with the current hard drive.

I had never heard of FIPS. Thanks for the link. Following another link in the link that you provided reveals that FIPS is a RED HAT tool for shrinking a FAT partition. That does not explain in any way why you had 2 primary partitions on your 4 gig hard disk.

There are tools that will try to shrink a FAT partition. FIPS is apparently one. Partition Magic (not free) is another. All such tools seem to advise strongly that you have a good backup of the hard disk before trying to use them. If you used FIPS or any such tool to shrink the C partition back to where it was then you would have the free space that we spoke of in previous posts.

You could also considering adding another hard drive to this system. Be advised that it is pretty old and buying new hardware might not make sense. And it is old enouh that it will have a limit on how large of a hard disk you can install. That limit will certainly be no larger than 120 gig hard drives, but might be as small as 8 gig hard drives. If you have old drives you might want to add one in, or you might find friends will small old drives that they would be glad to give you.

I hope you now see why Debian didn't find free disk space now, if not ask again and I'll try to make it more clear. Your probelm was likely that you didn't communicate with the shop that you were planning to install Debian on the space where D was and that they removed D (which really really never should have been there) but then decided to give you that space back, and worse they did it by resizing your C partition with some software like Partition MAgic rather than just making an extended patrtition and putting a D logical drive in it (if they had done it that way I could easily talk you through removing D again, but ....).