Currently my HD is one big partition all taken up by windows xp... im going to install red hat 9.0 and partition my HD... could somebody give me the exact steps of how i would go about partitioning my harddrive with Disk druid ( partitioning program comes with install package of 9.0)? i have never partitioned before so details would be nice... what buttons to push, what to type......etc.....down to the smallest details...

thank you,
Linux Newbie

I don't know about red hat, but it can't be too different from suse. Before install, I turned off virtual memory and then ran check disk and then defragged the disk. Suse re-partitioned the drive and then installed. Of course, suse also blew the britches off my master boot record so I had to fix that. Once I got grub to load everything ok, I reset virtual memory in windows. Expect problems and be patient. Today I told a friend that learning linux in a windows world is like (for me, anyway) waiting till midlife to learn a new native language.

when i have the disk druid screen up heres what it says for my current HD's(in columns and rows and stuff):
/dev/hdc;
/dev/hdc1 type: vfat, size(mb):39
/dev/hdc2 tpe: ntfs, size(mb):57184
free type: free space, size(mb):8



the options are:
New, Edit, Delete, Reset, Raid, Lvm

i would like to expand on what i said before.....about small details........ This stuff is so foreign to me i need liek every detail to where i click a button, etc........sounds Newbie........sadly it is

forgot to mention....i would like to retain windows as well as Linux so i can dual-boot...but use atotal of max 10 gb on red hat, maybe even less since i wont really be adding nething to it's HD.

if you want all your datas remain safely on your xp system, u should have them backed up ... write to cds or other hdd, then u can start designing your hdd for install ..
i can't see that a partition resizing software (like power-'something'), will help, coz u have a big size of windoze partition and i'm sure that u dump all your data there ...

just when your hdd ready for partitioning (means no more data there ...) you could easily install xp first using necessarily hdd space ..., than continue to install redhat

maybe this will help ... u could build partitions like this

==xp system (ntfs) 5gigs===|====red hat 10 gigs====|== the rest=====|

i'll recommend 2 alt for the red hat partitions
/boot , about 300 mbs, to put your boot files
/ , about 9.2 gigs, to put your system, application and home directory
/swap, about 2 times your physical memory size (the said so)

or

/ , any size that suite to put the whole red hat system (mosly apps)
/home, your home directory
/swap , about 2 times your physical memory size (the said so)

using druid is quite simple, select an empty hdd space, then click new, there you go ... nothing complicated