Ok, so i have Fedora Core 5. thats all I have on my computer, no windows XP at all. I was wondering how i could make a partition on my hard drive to install windows, because i realized that there are some applications that i do need to run.

any help would be great!

If it's a new machine (i.e. 1GB RAM or more) it might be better/easier to just download and install vmware, then run Windows as a virtual machine from within linux.

Otherwise, I do all my partitioning with the GParted Live CD since I don't like partitioning on a running system.

If there is free space on the disk, then simply let the Windows installer do the partitioning. Be aware that if you install Windows after something else, you may need to do some tricks with the bootloader (but it's all doable.)

Depending on how big your drive is, you **might** want to consider a second drive.

Tell us more about your configuration--size of drive, existing partitions, etc. (Post the output of "fdisk -l" (run as root).

I won't mention backup important data since I'm sure you already know that....

Ok, well this is a new laptop, but its like the worst one you can get from dell so its pretty bad.

I tried doing fdisk -l and nothing happened in terminal.

My hard drive is small but i dont need a lot of space. its a 40 gig hard drive with 30 gigs free. i was wanting to use 20 gigs for windows.

I tried booting from the windows xp cd to partition and all i get is a blank screen after it says it is examining my hardware configuration.

Should i get rid of linux, install windows and then install linux afterward?

oh btw i'm running Fedora Core 5

What's wrong with using QParted, available in many Live CDs like Knoppix, to resize the partition to get hard disk space for XP?