Hi, i'd like to ask an advice: the following situation sounds really crazy to me.
I have a emachines laptop N-10, Sempron 3200+, 1.6 GHz, 60 GB IDE HD, 1 GB RAM. I'm trying to install SuSE 10.1 in dual boot with Windows (the laptop came with Windows Media Center).
On the Hard Disk, 5 GB are taken for windows recovery partition, i shrinked windows primary partition to 20 GB (12 GB are already taken so 20 is the minimum i can reasonably do) and did a 2 GB FAT32 shared partition.
Then i tried installing SuSE 10.1, which has a net available space of 31 GB of unallocated space. I just chose KDE as a desktop and at the next step it keeps saying there's not enough space for linux, so its suggested partitioning is to delete all of the other Windows partitions.
Now it's crazy, i previously had 10.0 on a tower and gave it 15 GB... and was more than enough.
Minimum requirements for SuSE 10.1 are: Hard disk: At least 500 MB for minimal system; 3 GB recommended for standard system (http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/sysreqs.html).

My partition table: http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g1...partitions.jpg

Any suggestions? This thing is driving me crazy, i need to have both linux and windows but i'm stuck..
Thanks in advance

Just as a quick thought, try initializing your unallocated space to either reiser or other linux disk format. Perhaps for some odd reason SuSE isn't reading the space as usable b/c it's unallocated.

thanks for your reply goldennuggets.
I actually solved by deleting the fat32 that i did, then created an Extended and re-creating, inside the extended, a fat32.

Well this worked but suse cannot connect to the internet, it sees the network card but no way to connect, with any setting (i have dhcp, and also tried setting static ip.. no way out. I've been using Suse since 9.2 and never got such a weird situation).
Even worst, Windows doesn't boot any longer, the extended partition modified of course the MBR but windows should still be able to boot! (GRUB boot loader).
So now neither of the OSs are working... wow

Wow indeed. This doesn't sound like your day at all...
Are you sure you didn't unintentionally delete the wrong partition?
If you must, you can format the mbr to force windows to reboot, then put in either a live disc or rescue disc of linux and reinstall grub.

I presume, you created the extended partition to be of size 2GB and created a logical partition within and that resulted in SuSE not being able to use the remaining space. When you create and extended partition, select the remainder of the disk and then proceed with creating logical partitions within the extended partition. A lesson learnt, eh ?

You never mentioned where in you instaled SuSE into ?

Post your current partition layout which certainly would be the first step (from my point o' view) in resolving the problem you got.

That says you got SuSE working and ........ oops I don't understand the last paragraph !

when trying to boot into windows, it says that the file system32\hal.dll is missing. But from linux i see its still there.

Here is the partition layout:

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 552 4433908+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 * 553 3102 20482875 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3 3103 7295 33680272+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 3103 3484 3068383+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda6 3485 3666 1461883+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda7 3667 5129 11751516 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 5130 7295 17398363+ 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sda: 1038 MB, 1038090240 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 990 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 990 1013743+ 6 FAT16
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(988, 63, 32) logical=(989, 63, 31)

All the partitions are correct, the boot one (*) is correct, that is the windows ntfs. No windows partition had be touched when installing linux. So i have no clue what happened. And i dont think that reinstalling the mbr would solve the hal.dll missing problem.
My boot.ini file is:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Media Center Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

The windows CD that came with the laptop - media center- had no recovery console, furthermore

------------

Suse is not working either, no network, no sound and every 30 min or so the mouse and keyboard stop working and i have to shutdown with power button... wow the worst installation ever had

just wanted to post the "solution" of the windows problem: i booted from a CD, named fixndldr, that basically lets you skip the boot loader so you can boot even if your loader is damaged. Then i edited the boot.ini file and set it in the following way:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Media Center Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

that is (2) instead of (1) for two entries. Then it worked... It's crazy since noone did ever modified the boot.ini file, and before installing linux it could boot with no problems. I did not modify windows partitions or layout at all and linux was placed AFTER windows partitions... But yet windows does some surprises sometimes...

Yes, the partition number should have been 2 not 1 !!

As you let linux modify the partition table when you created/modified/deleted partitions, possibly linux set the first partition as active (should have checked the bootloader settings during linux installation). That made windows bootloader to get confused and change its boot.ini. Just a guess ! Most of the times the missing hal.dll indicates a problem with booting not the file itself.

Whatever, next time when you want to (re)install, you know now what to watch out for. You got to pay attention to the bootloader settings and partition layout, boot order etc.

I don't think installation went well. You might wanna reinstall after making sure the installtion media is not corrupt in anyway. Run md5sum on the media.

No the linux boot loader did not modify the active windows partition: as i specified above in the result of the fdisk -l, the active partition, marked with a star, is the correct one. This is what surprised me... correct active windows partition but no boot...
I have now fixed linux too, after a lot of struggling with kernel and so on... now both of the OSs are working (at least till the next... "suprise"...).
This laptop is not that good, even if it's brand new, so i expected troubles... not so many tho..

Thanks to everyone for your replies