I'm a newbie. I want to dual boot vista (unit's original os) with linux (red hat or fedora 4) but the systems keeps prompting for systems recovery cd after installation of linux. I partitioned my hdd with the windows management console hdd utility, created 15gb of unallocated space, restarted the system with the red hat cd and followed the needed steps. (The installation was painfully slow as well!) pls NEED HELP/ADVICE URGENTLY!

For starters, ditch Redhat/Fedora and use a more current distro. Neither of these are particularly well suited for laptops. Try OpenSuse 10.2, Mandriva 2007 Spring edition, or Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.

One thing I can tell you is you will need to install newer sound drivers. That system isn't supported in older ALSA releases. I believe that it is in alsa 1.0.14 (I wrote driver support for several Gateway systems).

Tobin

Check your BIOS settings: My Gateway system is set to boot a MiniNT in a small FAT partition which checks for the "correct" MBR in the other partition. If it doesn't find it, it starts the "recovery" process.

I think you can change your BIOS settings so it boots from the first partition instead of the MiniNT one. My Gateway laptop is a MX6436 with XP (not Vista), so I just set the C:/boot.ini file to let me boot Fedora if I wished. I not sure if Vista supports booting non-Windows OS, although I think I've seen some "How-to" comments about doing so.

So, if Vista does support booting non-Windows OS, you've got two options:
1) Bypass the MiniNT boot (i.e., make partition 1 active and set the BIOS to boot to it) or
2) Set the Vista boot loader to let you boot to Linux as well as Vista.

Note: Per GrueMaster's comment, Fedora Core 4 is not even a supported distribution. The only currently supported Fedora distributions are Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7, and support for FC6 will be terminated fairly soon.