It looks funny.Please tell me why and how do deal with it. The problem is that when I installed SUSE10 it shows that there is no partition in you hard disk and the SUSE10 will be installed in the whole disk. In fact there are 2 operation systems in my computer. There are 20 GB for windowsXP whose file system is NTFS. Another 20 GB is for redhat9 whose file system is ext3. Please tell me why the installation of SUSE10 can not find them but said there's no partition? I just want to make the SUSE10 take the place of redhat9. Thanks so much.

You need to do a custom install and then "Expert Partitioning" - this will allow you to keep your existing Windows OS and erase/repartition the existing Red Hat installation. See http://www.opensuse.org/Documentation for the OpenSUSE documentation and the suse10_start.pdf and look at page 8 onwards.

thank you so much oz_ollie.

I did as you told me oz_ollie. But it still dosent work at all. It's a pity that whatever I do the SUSE dosent recognize my current partition in my hard disk. It just said there's no partition in the disk. Thank you so much for your reply.

When you go into the installation process you select Installation at the boot screen, then language setting, then licence agreement, then you choose the Installation mode from a popup dialogue box, choose "New Installation", then select appropriate Time Zone, then select a Desktop (KDE is the default) and finally you are at an "Installation Settings" screen. The writing in partitioning will probably be red as you already have some existing partitions.

At the bottom of the screen is a drop down list, click on the black arrow and drag the mouse down to "Partitioning" and release or double click on "Partitioning". This is where you need to do your custom partitioning, you should see "Create Custom Partitioning Setup", select the radio button, and the screen should then list your IDE and/or SCSI HDD. Important - select "Custom Partitioning (for experts)" below the Hard Drive listing. Your hard drives are listed as hda, hdb, sda, sdb as per your hardware.

The file systems will be NTFS or ext2/3 for Red Hat, you need to EDIT your Linux partitions (ext2/3) and tell SUSE to format the partitions, default is ReiserFS.

If your drives aren't shown here you need some custom drivers for your motherboard, but as you already have a Red Hat installation there should be no worries.

Sorry, it is a bit convoluted - SUSE documentation is actually very good and after one or two installations the YaST install become second nature - much easier than Anaconda after this because all of the options are on the "Installation Settings" screen.

I'm sorry to waste you much time for my problem. But what I'm trying to say is just about when I come to the "Installation setting" screen. As you say The writing in partitioning will probably be red as I already have some existing partitions. The problem is there's nothing red in my screen. It just show the whole hard disk and the default partition list. Whatever I do it just only tell me there is no partition in the disk. I'm so sorry that it's really hard to describ. I should say it's different to redhat. Maybe it's due to my computer hardware. But I just want to know why the SUSE can not find my partition like ext3. Sorry I really need your help. Thank you.

emm, it's strang. I found it's not due to SUSE. I insert Fedora CD into my cd driver and boot from CDROM. It also told me that there's no partition when I came to the partition screen. Maybe the partition information of my hard disk can not be read now?

Is the hard drive being detected at all - are you seeing hda, hdb, sda or sdb? The partitons are hda1, hda2, etc.
If not you may need custom drivers? But if neither SUSE or Linux or Windows XP installation CDs can see the drive you need to check cabling, BIOS detection, etc

I think I have got the real problem of it. The follow information was given when I use Partition Magic to see my partitions:

"Invalid partition table on /tmp/hda -wrong signature 0".

I think my partition table has been damaged. So could you please tell me how to repair it. Thank you oz_ollie. By the way I still can start my system and I can use grub to load either windowsXP or redhat9.

Partition Magic can often report problems with hard drives partitioned with tools other than Partition Magic, especially when it finds non-Windows partitions. If the system still boots into Windows XP or Red Hat then there are no problems with you partition table or the hard drive. Whilst you are booted into Red Hat can you post the contents of /etc/fstab - this details all of the partitions currently installed and recognised by your Red Hat installation.

I still think you are getting slightly lost in the SUSE installation process - you need to edit/delete/create partitions during the custom installation and custom partitioning.

Is the hard drive IDE (hda, hdb, hdc, hdd) or SCSI (sda, sdb, sdc, ... etc)?

Thanks for your reply oz_illie. My hard drive is IDE. I know if I create new partitions the SUSE will be installed successfully. But you know, I just want to make the SUSE take the place of redhat9. If I can not see the current partitions how can I create new partitions with windowsXP saved. Let me tell you about what I am facing. When I installed SUSE it said there's no partitions in the disk. So the only thing I can do is to create new partitions as the hard disk has never been used. When I tried to install Fedora it told me something's wrong with the partition table and I have to repartition the whole disk. Finally I use Partition Magic to see the information of my current partitions and the erro information was given as befor. You see all of them can not recognize my current partitions. But I can boot into both windowsXP and redhat9, it's strange, isn't it?

By the way, I will post the file /etc/fstab later because I am using windows now. This file is the same as I just installed redhat as I know.