lemuel
The first PC hard disk were only capable of 4 partitions. Now you can have up to 64. The four partitions are called primary but now one of the primaries can be configured as an extended partition. An extended is the method of creating more then 4 partitions. You can create partitions inside the extended and these are called logical.

Usually windows configures the C drive is the 1st primary and the d drive is a logical partition with the 2nd primary being the extended.

Boomba
Select ext3. an ext3 is just an ext2 with journaling. You can still use all of the ext2 utilities. A ext3 filesystem is better at recovering from errors then an ext2.

Unallocated disk space is space that is not assigned to a partition. If you created a partition using Partition Magic then do not auto partition using unallocated space. Select the partition you created and assign it a mount point i.e. /.

The easiest method is to resize an existing partition smaller which then frees space that is now unallocated. The installer can create partitions within this free space. You can use Partition Magic to create linux partitions but then you are in charge of how many and size.

Just remember "Nothing hard is ever easy"

ok thanks michaelk.

lemuel
BTW I should of also mentioned that you don't have to remove any existing partitions but you will need to resize c and or d to make room for linux. I asume that your entire disk is partitioned for windows.

I have a dual boot machine. W2K and Redhat 9 Linux. I used grub as the boot loader and it works great. I think the documentation recommends using grub with a w2k or xp setup.

Ok, cool! that's one less thing i've got to worry about. thanks again michaelk

Well guys hate to say it but my installation was a total failiure..after I installed redhat 9 I restarted and booted to windows..the "hp system recovery" kicks in on my computer and it tells me that it is ready to recover my computer. So I cancel the system recovery and it continues to boot to windows xp..well everything is the way I left it but now when I restart my computer the GRUB boot loader for linusx is no longer there and my computer starts up windos again as if there were no linux there at all!!...I even tried to open partition magic and it wont start up and it gives me an error : "partition's drive letter cannot be identified"

so now I can't even delete the partitions and start over using parttion magic (not that i'm up for it at the moment) without using the hp system recovery cd.

but thanx for everyone's help this is a very helpful and welcoming board..I look forward to learning more about linux (once I get past this windows xp takeover problem)

thanx,
Boomba