Installing linux on harddrive with xp already on?
 

Ok heres where im at:

I have 1 harddrive, its only got XP installed at the moment, which is using 62gb and its got 11gb free which is what i want to install linux on so i can dual boot, but i dont want to reformat xp and everyting because it would take too long and i have too much stuff to restore

Anyway, i have the redhat 7.2 install cd's that i got off my brother but im a little scared lol and confused when it comes to having to make some partitions or what ever and then installing linux onto them

im not sure what to do and whats the process about the partitions and stuff, i dont just wanna put in the redhat cds, go install and when it comes to the partition menu just click a bunch off stuff and do the wrong thing and fubar my pc lol

any help would be great

thx

I expect that you'll find that your hard-disk is divided into one big partition for XP.

Red Hat 7 is quite old, so I don't know if it will be able to repartition an NTFS disk as used by XP. Your best bet would be to get a more moden distribution such as Fedora or Gentoo (both of which can be freely downloaded and burnt to CD IIRC), or a live distribution like SuSE 9.2 evaluation.

Alternatively, there are utilities like Partition Magic that can repartition your disk before you start. You just need to make the XP partition smaller and leave the rest as unpartitioned space; the installer will take care of the rest.

If you can't afford Partition Magic, then you might look at gnuparted (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/) It's a Linux program, but it can run from a bootable floppy; instructions at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/m...rted.html#SEC7

This is quite easy to do *BUT* you must read up and understand "partitions and stuff" thoroughly before you start.

The Gentoo handbook has very good overview to get you started:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=1&chap=4

Partition magic is a good way of doing this. Perhaps they have an evaluation version of it, which you might use, to do this. What you need to do is this:

1) You could wipe the harddisk clean (remove windows), repartition to your needs and reinstall Windows and Linux.
2) You can try repartitioning with Partition magic and then installing linux on the newly created partition. Make sure it is bigger than 4 GB or preferably 10 GB for Fedora core 3 full install, which gives you the joy of linux, if you never had linux before. Everything works out of the box.

This is right kind of thread for me. Can I join my queries too?

OK, I got Partition Magic today (it is 69.99 at Office Depot with 40.00 rebate - good deal!) and resized NTFS.

BUT... when I try to install RedHat 9.0 it gives an error after I hit the "partition option : manually using Disk Druid or automatically". I tried both but it cannot find any 'device' to intall RedHat!

We recently got Sony VIAO with 1 GB RAM and 200 GB HD with Windows XP (NTFS) already on it. I seperated 35 GB to intall RedHat.

I think rh 7 can automatically partition. You just need to give it unpartitioned space, and it will do the rest. Try installing rh 9, though. Its more updated.