I'm a student trying to install Red Hat 9 on my HP laptop. For those whom this will help, it's model ze5470us. Essentially it's got an 80 GB hard drive. My problem lies in partitioning the hard drive. I cannot do it, to say it simply. PartitionMagic 8.0 gives me errors when trying to create any kind of partition, as in error 893 (too many errors on hard disk). But when I run the PartitionInfo program, it tells me that I have no errors.

I really just want to put Red Hat on here, as I have been hired to do research using a code that is on a Red Hat terminal, plus I'd like some of the freedom of Linux in general. I'd like to keep Windows XP on this computer, as well as Red Hat (due to the fact that I have no more money to buy another computer). Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

A note - I do want to run dual boot. If anyone can suggest what I need to do to partition / other help on my laptop, I would appreciate it.

I have already tried running the Partition Magic with virtual memory turned off. I'm just bangin' my head into walls here, trying to get this done. Please, any help will be used.

Thanks.

does XP have any kind of defragmenting software? maybe it won't partition because it's too fragmented. i would first scandisk and defrag and then try again.

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately I've Defragged the hell out of my hard drive. When running, PartitionMagic gives me error 983 "Too many errors". Following what the website suggested, I ran PartitionInfo and found that my drive had zero errors. Thus I ran it again, only to get the same error message.

This is really boggling, I've tried defragging, defragging with virtual memory off, check disk, scan disk, everything I (and a fairly competent Linux friend of mine) can think of, to no avail. I can't get a partition. Is there something I'm missing?

one way or another, it looks like it might be a microsoft limitation (not suprisingly ) having to do with NTFS:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;308322

that says pm 6.0, but my guess is it might still be giving PM problems. also check this out:


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I've tried partitioning my 80 gig HD so that I can install Linux and keep getting this message:
Error 983 Too many errors to continue. The program has encountered too many file system errors to safely continue operating.
I then have to hit any key and XP boots up.
Even the support response from Power Quest did not solve problem.
Is it possible to partition a HD with XP present?
I did all this as Administrator. Made no difference.

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try running scandisk and defrag first

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Well, it's incredible to me but finally, after running defrag 4 times and chkdsk c:/f 3 times, I was able to partition my HD.

http://forums.techguy.org/t199373/sc...3db6d7df7.html


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i know it's not much different than scandisk, but maybe try chkdsk /f

http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id2628.cfm

Well, it worked. Thanks for the help. Now I have to install Red Hat 9, which is going to be interesting (since I just tried it and the damn thing won't read a file off of disc 1, so I guess I get to make yet ANOTHER copy of it. . .). Thanks much, hopefully this will help others too.

I had to run Checkdisk 3 times, defragged quite a few.

Thanks.

that's great! glad you got it.

btw, since you have to make a new CD anyway, why don't you try slackware, instead?