I'm attempting to load OpenSUSE 11.1 on HP dv7-1240us pre-loaded with Vista Home Prem. I tried to let the installation resize the windows partition, but got an error code 1012, that it couldn't set /dev/sda6 to type 82, so I restarted the install. The second go-around, it made no mention of resizing the windows partition, and the partition numbers had incremented, and it wound up with the same error. I saw that someone had mentioned to boot up Vista and use it to resize the partition, but it looks like the resizing has already been done. According to Vista the drive (320 GB) layout is:
Partition 1 -- (C 127.13 GB NTFS
Partition 2 -- (no drive letter) 2.01 GB
Partition 3 -- (no drive letter) 2.01 GB
Partition 4 -- (no drive letter) 154.03 GB Free space
Partition 5 -- (D 12.9 GB RECOVERY NTFS

Should I use Vista to delete partitions 2 - 4 and hope the Suse install will use the extra space? Any other suggestions?

I don't exactly consider myself a noob.

Boot a linux live cd and see what that tells you, partition-wise. You have those free partitions, why not manually set them in installation?

If the resizing of #1 has already been done, you can do the deleting of #2 & 3, creation of new partition etc. as part of Installation itself.

I'm not sure what I did, but I got it to load -- sooooo beautiful!!

The resolution was to either remove all the previously created partitions (not Windows!) including the extended on and then recreate them. Or it might have been that I selected ReiserFS as the file system types. Or it could have been a combination of both. Whatever, it loaded. The next major hurdle will be if I can configure the wireless and connect at home.

Many thanks!