New Dell Inspiron 1545 Laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium
Trying to load Fedora 10 in available space. Had to go to custom layout none of the other partition selections seem to work - kept getting error messages. Custom layout would let us format the / and /boot partitions we created. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ron

What help? You had some errors that you've not given us and details about, and then it worked... no?

Did you first resize the Windows partition to make space?

Note two possible meanings of "empty space".

1. Empty space within an exisiting (formatted) partition. AKA empty space in a filesystem.

2. Empty space on the disk, meaning not assigned to a partition.

You need #2 to install Linux. The disk manager in Windows should tell you what you have, or you can boot up from any number of live CDs---eg GParted or most common versions of Linux.

Excuse the incomplete problem report. We were able to create the / and /boot partitions but were unables to create the ext3 file system. We received an error message saying the system was unable to create the partition we configured or too many primary partitions (and there was only one primary partition). Does this make more sense? We are going to attempt to use gparted and see if that makes a difference.

Yes...

PartedMagic, GPartedLiveCD, or a partitioner on a linux live-cd should tell you what you have for partitions and create partitions for you. Open a terminal and use the command, "fdisk -l" as "su" or "root" to read the partition table.

You may be running up against the four primary partition limit if the Windows installation has a hidden recovery partition, leaving only two more. "fdisk -l" should see it as a additional partition formatted to Windows.

The way around the limit is to format the space you should use for linux as an extended partition, with logical partitions within, formatted for linux.

http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g...ded_partit.htm

On Vista, it is advised to use the Windows partitioning tool to change the size of the Windows partition if Windows is to retain its boot integrity. This may well be the case with Windows 7 as well.

I also have a Dell Inspiron 1545 with Windows 7 that I am trying to load Fedora on.
I shrunk the window partition using the Windows partition editor. Control Panel -> System and Security -> Partition Layout right click and Shrink partition.
Then you should be able to load up Fedora on the available space on the harddrive and it will automatically designate the primary and secondary partitions.

When loading Fedora 10 I ran into a problem with the graphics card so I had to load it using text mode. Did you have this problem?