Hi guys,

After the good advice you gave me before I am all set to partition my windows XP machine and install Mandrake!!!

Oh dear a big stumble at the first hurdle encountered :-(

I installed partition magic and looking at the info I see I have the following partitions

disk 1 - Dell Utility (FAT) 70.6Mb
disk 1 C (NTFS) - ~148Gb
disk 1 * CP/M, Concurrent DOS... - 3.5Gb

I went to create a new partition on the c drive and got the following msg displayed by partion magic:

'The selected disk contains one or more partitions which cannot be moved. To complete this task use the operations menu rather than a wizard'

I looked through the menue and only found format/ convert/ info type options.

Can anybody advice on how I can partition my disk??? Will the mandrake installer be able to help me (I want to end up with a dual boot system)??

I appologies in advance if this is not directly a linux question.

You could use the partition tool that is included in the mandrake CD and let it take care of everything. Thats the simplest way to do it.

Good Luck

Thanks for the pointer re using the installer to split things. I may do this.

However I read that its best to have several partitions for linux rather than one big one - hence wanting to use PM.

I think I need to convert my c drive to a logial drive. Then I could do my other partitions.

Correct or will this conversion screw up everything......

It will do everything for you.. everything that needs to be done to get a dual boot system. Just read the prompts properly.

Hi ksgill,

Ok took your advice and just jumped in feet first to use drakeX.

I now have an issue though. I get all the way through the installation process (mandrake 10.1) and gave approx 15Gb for linux in the partitioning stage. However as soon as I get to the summary page the GUI goes blank ie just grey with no buttons etc and I have to power down.

I tried waiting around for a while but nothing happened.

Any ideas how to get past past this????

I am assuming that the install doesnt go properly.. could happen for many different reasons -> Hardware issues, corrupt CD etc. . If you can download another distro, I would recommend Suse 9.2. Thats the only thing I can think of..