HELP!! how can i partition for linux install?
 

i tryed installing linux but i wanna partition to run both windows xp and linux redhat v9, i tryed partition magic but it didn't want to work for me, anyone have any ideas? i really want linux!!

just do it manually in the installers...wipe the drive clean, pop the XP disk in, and in the setup when the partitioning screen comes up, tell it how much you wish to use, and just leave the rest of the space empty....when XP is loaded, pop your redhat disk in, and it will automatically see the free space, and just tell it to use all of it (whats left) , and then edit lilo/grub to dual boot ...
no need to use a third party app for something like this ..


actually i just re-read your post, and i am kinda getting the feeling that you may have xp already on there, is this true?

How is your drive partitioned already?
Can you safely reformat a partition as Linux?

Tip one: hard drive a is called hda
and drive b will be called hdb.

You can install Linux and Windows on hda as
hda1 and hda2.

Basically you format the section of the drive you want as Linux
and then create mount points.

The subdivisions of hda eg hda1, hda2, hda3
can be assigned mount point
hda1 /dos -- ie Do NOT reformat
hda2 /
hda3 /user

oh yes and you need a swap space (twice your ram up to a Gig or so..)
hda4 could be swap....

Hope this helps.
I used to be tricky but if you go in as custom it shouldn't be too bad ;)

yea i already got xp installed, but i am willing to reformat the drive and do what u say just so i can have linux, but when i install xp is the partitioning stuff right at the begginning? when its got bad graphics and all that good stuff?

yah the "blue screen" installation part, when you pop the cd in ...
and the other question is, if you have xp installed, do you have any unpartitioned space, or a seperate partition that you can kill to put linux on, or do you just have one big partition setup on the drive for XP?

yea i have my whole hardrive running ntfs under windows xp. I almost have partition magic 7 downloaded , and if that doesn't work then im gunna go for the reformat like u say.

yah if you have it all one partition then you are going to need an app such as PM 7 or 8 to resize it and get some space for linux ... but if worse comes to worse, then you can do what i mentioned above ...

p.s. since you may in fact end up formating and starting fresh, i will tell you if you want to have read/write access to your windows partition from linux then format it as fat32, otherwise if you format it as ntfs you will only have read access ...
just wanted to make you aware of that in case you need to have write access ...