eBopBob - I would recommend that you take care of the partitioning issue first, as an independent task, rather than to treat it just as one step of many in the Suse installation process.

If you have a decent partitioning tool (ie, Partition Magic) then use it to repartition your drive as you described: 16G for Windows, 20G for Linux, and 500Mg for swap. If you don't already have a partitioning tool, I'd recommend trying BootIT NG which I consider one of the best utility programs out there. It can easily resize your existing Windows partition and create your Linux partitions.

As I suggested before, my recommendation would be first defrag your C:\ drive, then do all the partitioning work as a separate project, then install Suse. Installation is a pretty big step all by itself, there's no reason to complicate it further by shoving the partitioning work in there too.

Good luck with it. I think you actually are really close to succesfully installing it, and the partitioning is the only thing holding you back. Give BootIT a shot and hopefully that will help. -- J.W.

Hello eBopBob:

To speed up the W98 defrag utility do a cntl-alt-del one time for the task window.
in the task window "END TASK" for all programs listed except EXPLORER and SYSTRAY.
You'll have to C-Alt-Del for each program and be careful you don't get carried away and do it twice or you'll have to start all over again from a reboot.
Then do a SCANDISK without disk surface treatment.
Then do the DEFRAG

The above should speed up those operations. As far as the install you've been doing I had the same problem because of a bad disk. A replacement solved the problem.
Just email SuSE support from the people you got the disks from.
The SuSE installer should call for the repartition stuff as a default. You can use fdisk if you want and FAT32 works just as well as any other FS for startup purposes.
Hope this helps.
PaulT.

Ok, well GOOD GOOD news!!

I not have SuSE Linux 9.1 Pro installed. It turned out one of my projects was corrupt (shame, started working on it in 1999, then moved to this laptop and I didn't check whether it was ok or not), and also my hard drive was HEAVILY fragmented even though I defragmented it only four days ago.

Anyway, thank you all for your help. SuSE is now installed and I'm very pleased.
Now if I only I could get the modem working!! :P

Strange - I ran full scandisk and full defrag on a Windows ME machine (HP Pavilion, Celeron, 30 GB, 192 MB), then booted a burn of the SuSE personal edition ISO download. It defaulted to giving me about 20 GB on the Windows partition (14 GB was used by Windows), allocating the remaining 9 GB to ext3 and swap. When I said OK, it hung at 40% and thrashed the CD-ROM, even after I let it run overnight. I will try a non-SuSE partition manager.
I don't want to just wipe out Windows because I don't know how well my D-Link 520(e) 802.11b card will work on Linux.

Hi,

Just an idea -- try booting the SuSE 9.1 Live CD to check for HW compatibility.

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-cd-9.1/

I installed SuSE 9.1 on an HP Pavillion but used a clean drive.

It was the first time I sound, printing, and cd burning with no extra effort!
Be sure the printer is on when you install though.

Mark

I presume you mean resizing. Maybe try and do as was recommended to me: close all programs/applications except Explorer and Systray. Then do Scandisk without Disk Surfrace Treatment and then finally Defragment.
What I did when it was defragmenting, was view "Details" and it actually shows you there. My hard drive was pretty badly fragmented only after one or so days use. No idea why though... :-?

Also, after you did Scandisk and Defragment, did you use the computer a bit, or automatically pop in the SuSE CD, and restart?


Also, as Mark says, check the LiveCD. If your D-Link 520(e) 802.11b card works well in Linux, then maybe only use Linux.