I picked up a new-to-me HP (Pavilion 6545C) that needed a new hard drive. I ordered a new 40 GB hard drive for it and a copy of Slackware on Monday. The original hard drive was a 13 GB. So far all the people that I've asked haven't been able to be really specific about how much of the drive I'll be able to use because of the age of the chip.

One suggestion was to partition the drive so that I can use the whole thing. Several partitions instead of just one big one but it would still be better than just 13/40 GB.

This is my first experience with Linux.

So, my questions are these:

1) Will partitioning let me use the whole drive?

2) How much trouble will it be to partition the drive during the install?

I'm just trying to figure out how much of a hole I've dug for myself. Thanks.

1) If it had a 13GB disk i don't think it'll have problems with a 40GB one. If you have, yes, try making small parititons on it.

2) There's no problem, just run fdisk or cfdisk when asked.

I would suggest that you simply create two partitions of approx 20g apiece, plus one small partition for swap space. Install your linux distribution into one of those 20g partitions. You can always use the 2nd space later, at your convenience, for storage, dual-boot, isolating /home, whatever u want. The point is, youll have future flexibility.

There's a chance that the HP machine will not detect the 40GB drive correctly, but Linux will most of the time have no problems with determining the drive parameters. Linux does not use the BIOS when it queries the disk drive, whereas the HP computer will.

For instance, my old IBM machine refuses to see more than a few GB of my 80 and 160 GB drives, but in Linux I have the full capacity of those drives available to me.

Cheers, Eric

Hmmm... Well the drive is in. Now I'm just waiting for my Slackware discs and I guess I'll find out.