I have recently bought a Philips MT2400 Windows XP PC. It has a Maxtor 250GB Hard Drive. If I go into 'disc management' within the XP Control Panel it tells me that the primary partition is NTFS, and there is a 'Recovery' partition which is FAT32 (capacity 4.74GB, free space 2.32GB). I have made a recovery DVD as instructed. I would like to install SuSE 10 on this hard drive if possible, for a dual-boot system. I have ordered a copy of SuSE X for Dummies from the bookshop in the hope of having simple and comprehensible instructions to go with the distro.

I would appreciate any advice about how to go about this. Thanks very much.

I'm guessing that the Recovery Partition is the first on the drive and then the XP partition. In which case the thing to do is to resize the XP partition (backing up all data before hand) shrinking it by the amount you want to allocate to the new SUSE partiton (remembering that you'll also need a Swap partition as well).

There are two ways to do this, use commercial software like Partition Magic or use the resizing tool that comes as part of most Distro install procedures.

P.S. Have you tried a live CD like Knoppix to test for general hardware compatability?

Novell's own SUSE install guide looks nicely written, and covers all the steps you'll need to install SUSE without getting overly technical. If there are specific issues or questions you have, feel free to ask back for advice/clarification.

And the hidden partition shouldn't be an issue - I'm not sure on what/how a partition gets 'hidden', but I am sure it's a Windows-only thing (perhaps a special filesystem?). The partition is there on your hard disk, and as a result Linux's fdisk utility (or similar) will be able to see and edit it. My guess is that in the worst-case scenario it'd come up as "unknown filesystem type" or something like that.

Belated reply.

I tried out SUSE 10.0 with a live DVD and set myself the task of getting online.

YaST recognized my wireless card and made connection to router. I learnt to do 'route add default gw 192.168.1.1' from a guy in local LUG. That got me online but only with IP addresses (as he predicted). Then I had to change permission on the etc/resolv.conf file and add 'nameserver 192.168.1.1' and it worked. Really enjoyed it although timeconsuming. Prefer it to having a black box which usually works but no idea what to do if it doesn't.

Thanks for your help.

Excellent, I'm glad you got it sorted. I completely understand what you mean about the black box - I've found it often takes time to get up to speed with things in Linux, but when you do you're a lot happier about how it all works!