Hy, guys

After had spent 2 days installing Win98 & XP, I'm to install the Red Hat 9.1, but I have some concerns:

.I divided my Seagate Barracuda 80Gb in the following partitions:
c: 1,5 Gb Fat 32 (Win98)
d: 70,0 Gb NTFS (XP)
e: 0,5 Gb Fat 32 (future swap between OS's)
f : 6,5 Gb Fat 32 (future RedHat, I hope...)
h: 1,5 Gb Fat 32 (future FreeBsd, I hope, too...)

The 70Gb partition was originally created as FAT32 (to permit instalation of Win98) and converted to NTFS during the XP installation.

I used the DiscWisard Diskette, from Seagate, to partitioning (the fdisk_Win98 didn't work).

I updated the Bios Award to recognize the HD.

All partitions as visible to XP and Fat32 are to Win98.

I'm using OSL2000, but in fact I can't choose XP: I have to choose Win98 and then use the Internal Windows BootLoader.

Reading about RedHat installation I see that in my case, I'll use the space of an used partition (f: 6,5 Gb Fat 32), but I read that I'll have to "delete?" the partition and then "create the appropriate Linux partition(s) in its place...".

As the F: is visible to XP and was made using DiscWizard, I'm really worried about delete it.

.Can I really do it, without damage others OS's?
.I've lost a XP installation when deleted a partition from fdisk;

Thanks in advance

[]'s

Aluisio Macedo

can you use disk wizard to remove the three "linux" partitions?
if so do, it should sort the drive letters out for you (??)
then
reboot with redhat disk1 in

I still haven't installed any Linux... I'm planning to, but not before be sured that my 2 reported days of work won't be lost.

As a newbie I need to keep XP running.

so long as you don't have any special XP system files on the fat32 partitons, it will be ok. XP will notice that the harddrive partitioning has changed and adjust itself. By 'special' I mean things like the Windows, Program files, Documents and Settings folders. As salparadise says, use DiscWizard if you can. And BACKUP stuff that you cannot afford to lose before you do anything to your partitions.