I know, it's a horrible thing to do, but I need Windows for a few specific things that I've realized I can't do in linux. That said, I have 4 partitions set up: a boot partition, a linux partition, a swap partition, and a small partition that's been completely blank for quite a while now. How can I install windows (2000) on this without destroying my ability to boot into linux, or reformatting my harddrive altogether.

Thanks a lot for any help you may have,
Cam

PS - please don't argue that I don't need Windows for anything, that's not why I'm posting - I love Linux, it just isn't the end-all for me.

you must install curtains into the partition where it must rest in peace. unfortunately this destroys your boot loader that lets you get into linux, so you must either edit the curtains boot loader (i think the file is boot.ini, or look in your system control panel and go to the advanced tab and it's somewhere around there)
The other option is to boot from a linux cd, and reinstall your linux boot-loader, and set this up to access curtains as well. This can be easy or hard, depending on your distro and experience. Also sometimes curtains complains that you are not using their proprietry boot loader, ntldr (hence you may get an NTLDR error)

Or if you have a fast computer you could always install VMware

VMware costs money unfortunately and isn't an option for most people.
Get information about your bootloader (lilo or grub) I recommend Grub, it's nicer

Make sure you have a bootable linux-something around. Install windows on that empty chunk, and boot of that linux-bootable-something. Do what that info tells you to do so you can reinstall the bootloader. Most guides include a section on how to boot Windows too.
Good luck

Yeah ok - my Gentoo install CD is bootable, so I could use that to mount my existing partitions and reinstall the boot loader/fix the MBR. That solves one problem. The second problem is how do I install Windows? I'm pretty sure that popping the Win2000 CD in the cd drive and booting the machine will tell me that I need to reformat, something I really don't want to do. How can I specify that it should only be installed on partition x?

Thanks a lot for the replies,
Cam

Eek, hate to waste a perfectly good gentoo install, but i did something similar in my mandrake days. I think you can trick it by formatting your blank partition as fat32. then it will think that's where it's supposed to upgrade. just pay VERY close attention to the partition id's before you install. It might even ask if you want to install to different drive letters. I haven't set up windows in a long time i guess....good luck i'd hate to see you have to recompile everything

windows xp lets you choose which partition to set it up from, I havn't installed windows 2000 before, but I would assume it would be much the same. In any case I very much doubt that windows setup will completely repartition your hdd without asking. win9x would but win 2000 checks for other os/partitions, so give it a try. You could format it as fat32 but if it was me I would want ntfs (say, I think windows should adopt reiserfs in it's next version). Getting off the subject, I do wish gentoo had the option to download/install binary packages OR source. It takes an awful long time to compile anything on a 233mhz (don't laugh at me)

no laughing i installed gentoo on my 166 mhz laptop...took 9 days. The only reason i mentioned fat32 is that linux can write to fat32 and it's nice to be able to write to your win partition now and again especially if it's the secondary OS.

yeah - I'll definately use FAT32 - so how exactly can I format my blank partition though? I guess I'll try that (using fdisk?) and then pop the Win2000 CD in and if it starts to do anything funny I'll panick and rip the power cord out. Perfect!

Thanx a bunch,
Cam

PS - I'm really not looking forward to having winblows again, but whatever...

Just out of curiousity, what do you need Windows for specifically? Not saying GNU/Linux satisfies everyone's needs, but just wondering what needs of yours aren't met (since I thought the same thing for a while, until I found some software that I didn't know about, and more games were ported).

here's what you need to do:
using fdisk , change the blank partition ID to fat32 . then , reboot with your windows 2000 cd on the drive... it will find 4 partitions (like you said) : 3 of them will be marked as unknown format and one of them will be fat 32... choose the fat partition and then windows will ask whether it should format the partition as fat or ntfs (it's necessary to format , 'coz you only changed the partition id , but not its contents). then , it's just a common windoze install..
after it's done, use your bootable linux disk to restore your boot loader...

I've done this at least 3 times recently and it always worked fine.

perfect - I'll do that as soon as I get the time, thanks a lot for the help.

As for what do I need it for:
1. Something I don't think I'll ever get in Linux: a small program called PowerTab used by guitar players to create and view files which display tab (a type of guitar notation), standard notation, and play a midi file.
2. Something I'm too lazy to spend a weekend getting to work well: my scanner, my digital camera, and my audio line-in for recording guitar.

That's it.

Thanks a lot,
Cam

Can't really help out with laziness ;-), but there is the following software you might want to check out, if you haven't already:

eTktab
KGuitar
MusE

There's also other great software for Guitarists listed in a five page article here:

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/li...ux_guitar.html

I mainly play the keyboard myself, and have found that MusE works out great. If I wasn't so lazy :-), I could start seriously recording music using Audacity for editing and what not.

Once you get out from the original bout of lazyness and get them working, they'll work forever
Try going to

www.tldp.org

They have a lot of howtos on installing and using all those