I'm having some problems re-partitioning my existing hardrive in preperation for a linux install. Apparantly Windows places a file at the last cylinder on the hard-drive ( a swapfile) and it cannot be partitioned until this has been removed.

I'm currently using windows me - does anyone know what this file is called so that I can find it and remove it! Its been suggested that it might be index or mirror but I can't find these on my harddrive

the mandrake linux installer will let you resize your current windows partition and install linux on the new free space... i think a lot of other distros let you do this during install but i'm not sure... anyways, as long as you scandisk and defrag your windows partition before starting to install linux, everything should work smoothly...

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/

im only have red-hat and this won't do it for me - i have defragged the hard-drive and this wont remove the swap file.
I've only used fips to try and partition the drive and this claims that I cannot use the free-space until the hidden windows file is removed

okay, how about if you back-up you windows partition to another drive and then just create an empty windows partition on your current drive when you install red hat? then all you have to do is restore the backup to the windows partition and make sure it's in lilo/grub and stuff... (this might imply formatting the windows partition... if you have win2k or winxp then you'll most likely have to use the "fixboot" thinggy on the recovery console on the cd to make it okay with the new "disk geometry"...

thanks - i may give that a go if all else fails - sounds a bit complicated for a newbie! only one way to learn tho...

it's only a suggestion, but i really believe you should try mandrake linux... it'll make the life of a newbie much easier and you can always "move up" to red hat later... i put "move up" between quotes because mandrake is red hat based and you don't just get compatibility, you actually get most of the great features... and then some. for example, the topic of this thread... with mandrake the installer would take care of resizing windows for you... EVEN IF YOU HAD AN NTFS PARTITION.

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/

I have never heard of needing to delete the swap file, however I believe it is called win386.swp. Deleting it shouldn't hurt.

Hi Brad,
I'm a newbie too, but your partitioning situation sounds familiar. If you are using a floppy startup disk (easily made from one of the tabs on Windows ME disk cleanup), then partitioning the entire drive should get rid of the SWAP file very handily. Fdisk.com and the "Radified" site it referred me to, seemed to explain this pretty well. You will delete the old partitions, and then create a primary, extended and logical partition.

I got through all that, but then when I exitted from fdisk, the A prompt would not accept any format commands.

Any comments on this welcome.

beginnerx

To get rid of the swap file, disable Virtual Memory Management in Windows. You can find the menu for this by right-clicking My Computer. I think it's on the last tab. I think this is only a problem with fips, since it doesn't move any data when it resizes (that's why you defrag before you use it). Parted (another resizer) moves data out of it's way by itself. When I used Parted to resize, I didn't need to disable the swap.

I have windows Me. Mandrake cannot resize, or install into, my windows partition - siting that it is too fragmented. I run the windows dfrag, but the same message comes up. Help!

use parition magic 8, it will occasionally make the swap somewhere in the middle of the partition (i was lucky one time to have it in the front )