Hi,

I have a desktop pentium 4 running XP professional w/20GB of unused disk space. I would like to conver this machine to dual boot and use this space for Redhat9 (or any comparable distro).

I guess I need to repartition the disk so that windows doesn't see this space. I'm not quite sure what to do...


Can I do this w/o buying partition magic and w/o formatting my entire partition and beginning with a redhat install? How do I proceed?

thanks,

Manuel

well the first question would be is the unused space partitioned or just free space? if yes then you need to resize it. this can be done with fips. This is located in the dosutils directory of redhat cd. or if it is just free space then boot linux up off of the cd. there should be a program called autoboot.bat. just exit to dos and cd to the D:\dosutils\ dir and type autoboot. this should boot linux and it's install program. Now I found an excelent how to on the net go check out http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/...ies.html#AEN72
I thought it was fairly comprehensive for an faq.

You do not need a third-party partition tool (Partition Magic, etc) in order to install Linux.
The Linux installation process can resize (reduce) a windows partition (FAT32 and NTFS).

I suggest using a more recent Linux distribution such as Fedora Core (RedHat), SuSE 9.x, etc.
because some older versions are not able to manipulate a NTFS partition... plus, RedHat 9 has been discontinued.