Partitioning Problems
 

When i install and have to partition, whether i choose automatic or druid (i havent tried fdisk, it said its for 'experts', so i stayed away ) no matter what i try to do, i always end up with a 'could not allocate partitions as primary partitions'.

Any help would be appreciated, i got 2 hard drives, one with 5gb free, the other with 217mb free, i chose personal or whatever it is, and it is supposed to come to about 1.2gb when installed so i must have enough space.

Is this going to be a dual boot machine?

How many primary partitions are ther already, BIOS can't handle more then 4. So try to make logical partitions (partition within a primary partition). If you have only one pimary on each disk and the rest are logical partitions Linux can work with it. You will still be able to make a dual-boot configuration.

Yes i would like it to be a dual booting one, and to answer the other reply i have never paritioned either disk.

Thanks

What are you dual booting with? Windoze?
If so - is it already installed? When you say FREE space do you mean the space that windows says is free or space that isn't used for other partitions?

Id like to dual boot with windows98 - yes it is already installed on the second hard drive (the one with the least space left).

Im going by the amount of space windows says.

You can't really install linux in that free space unless you configure it to run as a program under windows (not something I recomend).

Think of it like this (assuming you have only 1 partition on each drive that fills it):
1) Each disk is a pie
2) In your case windows has eaten all the pie and has left no space for linux because it has only one partition
3) You need to allocate some pie (a partition) to linux

You could use the whole of the drive with 5GB free and get linux to wipe all the partitions but you WILL lose all your data - will it all fit on the other drive?

Even though Windows says that is "free" disk space (i.e. not used by any Windows files) it is not available to Linux -- yet. Think of it as unused space on a Windows partition.

What you need to do is defrag this disk so all the Windows blocks are moved to the front of the Windows partition. Then use a utility (Partition Commander makes it easy, fips will do the job too, but I've never used it) to make your Windows partition smaller. When you've done this, the leftover space on the disk will be available for Disk Druid to repartition according to your needs.

E.g. you currently have a 20GB disk, all of it is one Windows partition. If you want to create 5GB of space for Linux, resize your Windows partition to 15GB and leave the other 5 unallocated. Disk Druid will see this unpartitioned 5 GB and lay down your /, /boot, <swap> partitions.

Edited to add: if you allocate every last bit of free space to Linux, this will make things very tight on your Windows partition. You probably should leave yourself enough room to breath there.