I am trying to install SuSE on an extgernal FireWire drive with XP on the main drive.

The drive is reagognized, however, when the install program inspects my system, it says that YaST will not be able to partition the drive correctly for SuSE.

How should I prep my (blank) external drive so that YaST can modify the partitions and continue with the install?

I have tried many things, like opening the terminal (alt+F9) and setting up a normal Linux partition and a Linux swap partition, and yet the install still does not work.

Is there a special way of formatting the drive (I have been doing so through Windows)?

I am not completely sure about this but I had a similiar problem with an internel hard drive. You may have to go into your bios and change a setting or two. I'm not sure what ones, lol. The problem I had was that my bios wasn't recognizing my second hard drive. Even though I could access it from linux I couldn't install anything on it. So I changed a few things in my bios and it recognized it, then I had no problem at all installing linux. I am not sure if this will help at all but it may give you a starting point, or not. Try and do a linux google search on how to get your bios to recognize a firewire external drive and see if that helps.

And format the linux partitions with the linux iinstallation disk. Windows is messed up and I personally don't trust anything that is done through windows.

Edit: Before you make any changes to your bios find out of it has a jumper setting that will restore the default settings. This will help if you make a mistake and can't boot. It also has a setting in cmos that will reset default settings.


Webwolf

No...

The SuSE CD is unable to partition the drive correctly... is there a special way to prep it?