Hello Linux Community,

I am pretty new to Linux, so please correct any mistakes in the post. I am trying to install the Chakra 2011.12 distro from a Linux Format Magazine DVD alongside Windows 7. I have created a 100GB unformatted partition. When I get into KDE through the Tribe installer, the option to create a new partition from it is grayed out. I plan to use 500MB for the boot loader (BURG). Then, make an extended partition of 90.5 GB for the OS. I will use the ext3 file format for both. I have switch users and logged in with root/root. This, however, still did not enable the "New" option in KDE. I have also tried to use the su, and sudo commands in Terminal (on seperate tries) to access the administrator account. Both of these were fruitless. Does anyone have a suggestion? Also, my PC has 8 GB RAM. Should I also make a swap partition? I have read that this is only necessary if there is a "small" amount of memory on the PC. Thanks for reading this entire post, and any advice is much appreciated!

Usually it is best to leave the disk space unallocated rather than try to pre-allocate a partition from Windows.
From the root user enter this command in a terminal and post the output (lower case ell, not number one)

Thank you for your response. Here is the output from fdisk - l :

Disk /dev/sda 640.1 GB
255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
sector size(logical/physical): 512 bytes/4096 bytes

I/O size(minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes/4096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 63 2047 992+ 42 SFS
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary
/dev/sda2 * 2048 409599 203766 42 SFS
/dev/sda3 409600 1024581474 42 SFS
/dev/sda4 1024581475 1250261679 42 SFS
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary