OK, I bought a new hard drive (maxtor 240 g I think) and made a 10gig partitions for windows 98. That is installed and done.

Now, using knoppix booted from cd, I am in Qtparted, and I have this:

01 /dev/hdb1 fat32 (active) 9.32GB
02 /dev/hdb-1 free (hidden) 224.44 gb

I have 512mb of memory -

my question is what do I make from here? The rest of the space will be used by linux, so do I make a swap partition (and is this primary or active) and let my fedora dvd do the rest? What is the best way to proceed? I was thinking of using a large portion of this drive a data storage area that could access my mp3 collection from either os, that would be protected if I decided to switch to a new distro without having to worry about backing it all up, as I have about 100 gigs of music currently.

Thanks to all who have helped so far! This site has been really great!

joel

If you're running Windowze you could use PartitionMagik to make a couple of partitions. So, you need a main Linux partition and a swap.There is a special type of format type for swap.. and that is .. just that.. "Linux Swap" ..and it's a logical partition. That can be done automatically by the partition manager.
The free version is to just insert your fedora dvd and use DiskDruid to setup the partitions. Usually Fedora will try to automatically setup the necessary partitions. (Meaning that you won't need Disk Druid).Also there's recommended that you make at least a /home partition so in case something goes wrong.. your data will be safe. About your music.. I guess that it should be stored in a FAT32 (or NTFS.. but then you'll have Linux write problems) so that Fedora can see the partition.

before you install linux, create a FAT32 partition...big enough to hold your mp3's..plus a little more, in case you wanna add to them.
once thats done, i think fedora will use the free space and allocate what it needs to install the swap and root partitions.