Hey, i am desperate trying to get linux installed. I have been at it for days now with nothing to show. I have tried all kinds of things! I have WIN XP and want to dual boot it, but need help doing it. If you can help me i would be very much in debt to you. Either reply in this thread or im on my AIM SN : ballitup332564

^ that would be the fastest! - Thank you very much - EnSanity

okay bro, listen. First you need to tell us how you formatted the hardrive. If your computer came with Win XP already installed, I am going to assume that WinXP formatted your hardrive as NTFS, if you know, then tell us whether it is Fat32 or NTFS. If it's Fat32 then you shouldn't have a problem after you reboot and boot off of the Linux CD's, however, if you have done this and it's not working, it's probably because you got a NTFS partition. What you need to do,

is to get Partition Magic 8.0 or higher, and partition your hardrive, that is the only most reliable thing you can use to partition an NTFS disk....there is another program which I can't recall its name that can also do it...but the better one I believe is PM 8.0+

After you do that...then you most likely wont have a problem.

btw, what distro are you trying to install?...and also put up some of your computer specs please. thanks.

zLinuxz
(I'm back, )

hey - Im trying to install Slackware, and i did use partition magic 8.0 to divide my hd. I know have a seperate f: (10gb).

comp specs:

- I had win me and upgraded to WIN XP
- Athlon AMD 1400mghz
- 512 RAM
- I was using VMWare but it wont let me access partitions so i am trying to dual boot.
- Desperatly in need of help, have sufferend endlessly trying to get this.

Hope this helps, tell me if you need more. - EnSanity

Ensanity,zlinuxz gave you some great advice. Partition magic
made my dual boot install much easier,and I am very newbie.
Install the software and make the recovery floppies.The first one
loads dos and second will let you partition the drive.If you have the option I suggest you save your data and do a clean install of xp to a fat 32 fs unless you have to have ntfs. I also suggest you
use microsoft knowledge base article-305595 to make xp boot
floppy in case you have problems with lilo. Good luck.

i tried to make the recovery files, but after putting the diskette in it said it couldnt find it so i canceled ;\

hey, okay. You have splitted your hardrive in two parts right?, one is NTFS and the other is simply 'empty' space, yeah??
I hope that's right... okay...so just pop in your Slackware CD in the drive, and reboot, and boot from the CD...is your computer booting from the Slackware CD?, if not...check your BIOS and set CDRom to boot first than anything else. Then, just follow the instructions and use Disk Druid to make the internal Paritions in the second half of the hardrive you just splitted.

Then I suggest you install Lilo to boot WinXP and Linux, it should would with not hassles. Alright, good luck.

zLinuxz

some advice:

unless you know what you are doing slackware might be a bit intimidating. you might try something like mandrake 9.1. it is really user friendly and easy for a new user, and then move on to slackware or maybe try gentoo or something like that... mandrake helps you partition your hd in the install (fat & ntfs partitions)

quakz99 i might try that, a guy said he could help me install the slackware version, but its not going to well. As for zlinux, thanks for the advice, but i have already tried that. I go into bios and set ATAPI ROM to boot #1 and my HD to boot second, yet still it boots windows. Any insight on that?

well, many are the possibilities, but few the likely ones. What version of Slackware are you trying to install?
Do you see your computer trying to boot from the CDrom?, does the little light on the drive light up?, or does it not do anything, and skip right over into th booting from the hardrrive?
Another thing you might want to try is making a floppy boot disk...I know for new comers that is a big "UH??", but not to long ago, we all had to make boot disks. Here is a good How-to Boot disk.
http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/...WTO/index.html

Check it out bro.

zLinuxz

Awesome, ill try all of that ASAP, but i had to switch houses so i cant try it for another few days, can i keep you informed? Also thanks for your help, i really appreciate it! - EnSanity