Having decided to completely rid myself of Xp in favour of Mnadrake 10, I would like to do so in a windows free enviro. My laptop has the ubiquitous c: and D: dive equally apportioned 30gb each.

Bearing in mind there's some weird "windows reserves this space thing on the hard disk - you know the bit you see when partitioning, well I'd like to get rid of that too and have a completely clean 60gb hard drive before installing linux. Is it possible to get rid of this "reserved space". Bloody cheek if you ask me, after all it's my hard drive. Also once this has been done can I just pop in the Mandrake 10 disk 1 and it'll boot, partition and format?

I'm pretty sure of this:

Don't know about the GUI partition tools but cfdisk and fdisk (from slack) can see all hidden / restore partitions I've ever encountered. And there's no reason the other distros' partitioners can't either, so if you're just wiping the drive,

"pop in the Mandrake 10 disk 1 and it'll boot, partition and format"

ought to be about right.

Just tell it to delete the old partitions, all of them, first.

Oh yeah, just a tip, I'd make sure everything works under Linux before wiping everything else... if you didn't already check, that is. I hate laptops sometimes; you will too, if you skip this step and have problems

This info is from someone who has experience with only Slack, mind you.

HTH,

natedog

Thanks Natedog, I've already got it on a dual boot Partition Magic scenario. The only "problem" I have are the wi-fi (Belkin) PCMCIA card - which I think I've got the right ndiswrapper for and also the usual power management problems. That said, I was pleasantly surprised that Mandrake found everything else correctly on my Sony FR 315S - including Firewire.

1. Save any important data on your machine first.
2. Boot up a Linux system, either with an installation disk or a Live CD such a Knoppix
3. Run cfdisk, as natedog indicated. cfdisk will see all your partitions, regardless of whether or not they are "reserved", and you can drop and recreate them at will.
4. I'd recommend doing the partitioning up front, prior to launching the installation. It's just a lot easier to treat partitioning and installation as discrete events, rather than together, and have to do partitioning in the middle of the installation. Do them separately and it' much easier to concentrate on the task at hand.
5. Think about your Linux partitioning scheme first. Technically, you only need a small (eg 256Mg) swap partition and a main root (eg / ) partition, but for a variety of reasons it's useful to create separate partitions for different directories, particularly to create separate partitions for /home and /usr

There's a lot of advice about the "best" partitioning schemes, but if you've got a 60G drive, I'd allocate 256Mg for swap, 15G for /usr, 25G for /home, and the remainder for / That's just my advice, others may have different opinions.

Good luck with the project and welcome to LQ. -- J.W.