Hello, back again and I need to know from someone if upon booting from cd for installation of red hat with a windows xp pro machine with an ntfs file system and the whole drive partitioned for windows will the installer for red hat 8.0 partition and format free space or do I have to use a partition manager of some sort? This is my 1st attempt at a dual boot system and I have built three other computers which all still work great but never have used linux so therefore am very complacent to say the least....Any responses to above apprecciated, TY.......Ok more to add when trying to boot from cd rom it puts up alot of at end of post and acts like its trying to do something, it shows client mac address and then guid with like 32 0`s after and then says no boot filename and boots windows any ideas , im assuming i need a formatted partition but was under impression that install cd would do this, or is that only on clean no other os installed hard drives? please respond

I think Partition Magic is the best way to go. You can re-size your partition while in Windows, then reboot, and there is room for Linux.

Yup. Partition Magic is the way to go. I got XP/Linux dual boot and ran partition magic on XP then installed Linux. It was a while ago but I'm pretty sure you have to specify to Partition Magic that you are creating a Linux partition. During install Linux recongnizes the NTFS partition and stays away from it.

Good luck. As long as you don't format your NTFS you can always fix things.