well actually i'm trying to dual boot knoppix which is based apon debian of course, so i don't know if you guys and gals can help me? anyway if there's a tutorial out there that i could follow i'd appreciate the help i thought i knew enough about partitioning and i've installed the knoppix version of debian and windows xp, but i end up screwing up the one that was installed first. if you could tell me the partitioning setup i should use for a 120 gig hard drive, (30 for linux rest for xp) and the steps i could take thx in advance!

Partitioning.. 30GB for linux is more than enough. You do want about a GB of swap space.

Install windows first, then install Linux. Windows always steals the MBR. Virtually all linux distros will find the windows install and set it up to boot.

I've heard the knoppix HD install scripts arn't great. Perhaps straight debian? www.debian.org/distrib

Straight Debian will, of course, recognize & boot Windows. BUT you have to set everything up, whereas Knoppix has it.

i am a need knoppix, i did install knoppix that way but i gave it a 500 swap partition and took away the linux mbr and installed windows. please let me know what i did wrong.

From what I understand you have installed Knoppix on your HD, but then reinstalled Windows and lost the Linux boot loader.

If so, what you need to do is reinstall your boot loader. It's pretty easy, even trivial. I think if you click the K menu, then click the Knoppix submenu, there's an option. You should search Google for information, though. That's the best way to get a quick answer.

If you installed windows after linux, it will boot directly into windows, as that's what the windows bootloader tells it to do. Use your knoppix cd adn
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or
try all that in the terminal, and then see if it works

500 MB for swap is good enough.

could somebody give me an example of this. also if i just install windows xp then install linux i should be fine right? i have to do this anyway so i figure i might as well go the easiest route.

yeah, installing windows, then linux would solve your problem, the above mentioned steps were an example of what you would do, but you won't need to since you'll be installing windows first.

well i guess this is the last message i got this is just what i'm gonna do before i reformat again, well i took a boot cd that i got from freedos.com created a 84 gig fat32 partition then formated it i installed windows xp which i'm using to talk to you fine people right now. i'm gonna start up knoppix run qtparted, then create a extended partition and inside a root directory and a 1 gig swap. let me know what you think of my plan and if it didn't work let me know why. THX! i plan on donating some paypal cash to this great site btw.

I've never actaully done any knoppix installation, but I beleive that there are a set of scripts that install knoppix to the hard-drive. I don't know where they are, however. you can't just partition the hard-drive and have a working system after ward. You may be able to however copy the system from the CD, without using the scripts, maybe check google?