Hard Drive Partitioning - Dell Inspiron 1525 Help
 

Hi,

My friend and I are trying to installed Fedora 9 on my Dell Inspiron 1525. We get through the installation just fine until we get to the partitioning (which is pretty much the most important part of the installation) and we can't get past it. My friend has had experience with this, and apparently there are two partitions that are protected by Dell, at least he says we can't partition them as long as one of them is still around. There are two partitions, a really large one that is the rest of the Vista system memory, and there's a 2160 megabyte or so partition that we can't do anything with. He says that we have to get rid of one of them, but he doesn't know which one, and the problem is that if we remove the wrong one, Vista loses its boot file and can't boot up, which would require a complete wipe of my computer's memory and a complete reinstallation of Vista. If you can't tell, I'm not too keen on having to get rid of anything on my hard drive.

Which of these partitions is the one we need to delete? There are also other partitions he seems to think we'll need to delete, but I don't know how many of these I want to just get rid of. Can anyone tell me which partitions I'll need to get rid of to get Linux and Fedora running? Thanks for your help!

You might want to download the trial version of WipeDrive and totally clean the hard drive and then partition the drive with Linux. Obviously EVERYTHING is gone when wipe drive finishes so this will only work for a clean install.

Mmmm - I have a m1330 which came with 4 partitions already allocated. Fortunately, one happened to be a logical - i.e. an extended partition already existed. If not, you may have to delete a primary to make room for an extended partition. I kept them all, but it still caused some grief.
My advice - from Vista itself, resize the main Vista partition. Seems it won't allow you to go below about 50%, but that should do.
Then go get the gparted liveCD - it's a (GUI) Partition Magic look-alike. Boot that up, expand (or create) the expanded to use all the room. Then do the "expert" (or whatever Fedora call it, can't remember) install to force Fedora to use logical partitions - else it won't install at all.

Since you speak of the partitions, I probably should assume that you do not want to wipe the drive & that FewClues (& my advice) about the process is really an aside.

Note that
will probably do the same job that WipeDrive will. Just boot the target box from a (Linux) live CD, open a terminal, & go. You may have to run to figure out <target_drive>.


In fact posting the results of fdisk -l might help us help you identify the partitions you are dealing w/.