I am currently running a dual boot with Mac OSX and Ubuntu. I have four main partitions right now and about 200GB of free space. One partition is an EFI partition for rEFIt, one partition is HFS+ Journaled for Mac, one is ext4 for Ubuntu, and the other is the swap for ubuntu.

When I run the Windows 7 installer, I cannot create a new partition or format the free space and I am given an error, "Too many partitions of that type on this disk", when I try to use the free space. Any advice from other triple booters?

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You are probably trying to create an extended partition--you can only have four extended partitions per primary partition. I haven't used the Win7 installer--can you direct it to create a primary partition in free space? If not, you can certainly do so from Ubuntu. J ust create an NTFS partition, then start the Win7 installer--let Windows format the partition.

If that does not work, edit your question to show the output of "fdisk -l /dev/devicename" from Ubuntu.

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I think you have primary and extended swapped. Reading the OP's question, it sound's like he has 4 primary partitions, and can't add a 5th. (Because you can only have 4 primary partitions.) – Thanatos Nov 2 '10 at 17:59
You're probably right. OK, you're surely right. – CarlF Nov 2 '10 at 20:36
I figured it out on my own but thanks for the advice. You were right, I could only have four partitions, which was why I could not create a partition for windows 7. What I did was I removed the swap partition because with 2GB and after running Ubuntu for a year now, I know I will never need it. I've got my system set with rEFIt efi partition, a Mac partition, a Windows partition that stores all of the data in NTFS format, and a Ubuntu partition. By means of NTFS-3G running on my Mac Partition, I can now read/write data to the windows partition from any operating system. Thanks again! – bheussler Nov 4 '10 at 14:47
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