I want to dual boot red hat and win ME and I understand that additonal to the existing partitions I have to make 3 more for boot root and swap.......I can make these partitions but then there is something about mount points that I dont understand---do I just go into fdisk and make the three partitions or is there some thing else I should do as well? Please Help!!

That's right, and your /boot partition should be at the beginning of your hard disk.
You will have to use Partition Magic, preferably verision 6 or newer), to repartition your disk. Unless ofcourse you are doing a total reinstall of both linux and windows.
Fdisk can't resize existing partitions so if you don't have any unused space on your disk use Partition Magic.

Linux need to know where in the filesystem tree to mount the different partitions. This is where mount point come in the picture.
Windows separate different partitions and disk by assigning letters to them, a:,c:,d: etc. Tese are different file trees. Linux on the other hand gathers all disks,devices,processes under one filesystem tree.
Your 3 partitions should be mounted as follows:
/ - this is the root of the tree.
/boot - get's mounted on one of the branches of the tree.
<swap> isn't mounted in the file tree.

Ok so if I was doing a new installation of win ME and red hat then I would format the hard disk and then make 4 partitions. And /boot will be the first one size-16MB, / will be second 1.5 GB, then the swap partition 64 MB, and finally I remaining I will partition for win ME. Is this correct? And the mounting part of the partitions when do I do that....do I have to do that through some utility like fdisk or will red hat do it for me during instalation?
Please Help Thanks!

you dont do the mounting

this is done for you after you have installed linux, you will have to mount your floppy disks but if you use the X windows system there is an icon on the desktop.

i might add you need to install winME FIRST then proceed with linux

Yes this is right. Probably you would like to double your swap partition or even more if you have space for it.
I don't know how windows me works with boot partition above cylinder 1024 so you can make your / partition the last one.
Make your swap partition the second. This way it is placed in the outer perimeter of your disk wich is faster to read and write.

I just finished doing a dual boot between Win2K & RH7. I'm not sure how different Win2K is from ME, but they shouldn't b too different.

This is what I did:

Load Windows first! (Windows is more fragile than Linux)
If you have existing partitions, choose custom installation.
If not, then go workstation.
I did mine in Custom so this is what I did:

Follow RH's instructions.
When you get to the part to choose your partitioning tool, choose
Disk Druid...it's a lot simpler.
Make sure your Win is hda1. As to how much you want to allocate to each partitions, all I can give you is my part:

hda1 10001M
/boot hda2 23M
<Swap> hda5 2047M
/usr hda6 11648M
/opt hda7 11648M
/temp hda8 11648M
/ hda9 11625M


Then Format everything except the exisiting Win partition
Don't "Check for bad blocks" !!!!! It will keep you on for hours!

My computer has 60G HD and 1024MB RAM.

I HTH!

HHH