dual booting vista and alinux
 

ok i have a laptop with windows vista on it and i have shrank the hard drive down to accomidate for alinux but when i go to install alinux i cant find the partition i have set up i try check disk but it says i do not have permission and i try disk partioner but its notshowing any of my hard drives what is the simplest solution without haveing to reformat hard drives or disrupt vista

I thinks its not possible..
they are two different file system. it won't work if you dual boot vista and linux..

does anyone know for sure if its inpossible i have read some on internet about it but its always different kinds of linux and not alinux

Bollocks, Iv'e set up a dual bootable Linux/Vista in the past. So in general it is possible.

I've never used aLinux, but basically what your going to need to do is get your hands on a bootable Linux LiveCD such as Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, Knoppix etc and boot your computer into a Linux environment.

Then what you can do is run a program called 'gparted' (short for Gnome PARTition EDitor). This graphical based utility will illustrate how your hard disk is currently partitioned, and you can use this program to edit your partitions, create new bootable partitions and so on.

Hope this helps, give it a try and post back any specific questions.

Hi,
You should not use anything other than the M$ Vista tools on a Vista HDD. To do so will only create other problems.

You should first defrag the 'Vista' partition using the tools available within M$ Vista. Then shrink the partition using; 'Start >Right Click Computer > Pick Manage > Pick Disk Management > Pick Drive >right click on drive to choose option'. You should be careful with the above operation.

Once you have performed the shrinking of the partition to allocate space for a Linux install you can now boot the distribution. Once booted the install will depend on the distro and relative technique. I like to create my partitions first from the cli with 'fdisk /dev/hda' (change to your device, hda,b,c,d or sda,b,c,d).
You can use a '/' and swap for most installs. The filesystem type is generally a personal taste but I prefer ext3. The reason is that it is universal and a reliable journaled filesystem. The 'swap' is generally created '2X RAM' for space allocation but that is not always true with newer systems having sufficient memory. With modern HDD the 2X rule doesn't waste a lot since most new HDD are in the 160GB to 1 TB range now.

Once the partition(s) are created and the partition table has been written I will then re-boot to insure that the partition table is updated. After the re-boot and from the cli I will use the 'mke2fs -c -L root -j /dev/hda' (again use your device) to create the filesystem. You can always 'man mke2fs' to understand the command and options. The 'LINUX MAN PAGES ONLINE' is a good online reference to use while within a M$ browser environment let alone a Linux browser.

The reason I create my partitions and filesystem outside of a install is that I can insure no holes(bad sector or marks) that I would not be made aware of until the installer performs. This is important with a swap. To create the swap, I would use 'mkswap -c /dev/hda2', use your device partition here.

Now that the partitions are created you can continue with the install/setup of the new distribution. I would re-boot the install cd to insure a clean start again.

BTW, Welcome to LQ and Linux.