Hi,

this is prob a massively stupid question from yet another newbie.

I am buying a laptop and have checked that the relevant components are compatible with Linux, specifically Slack 9.0.

I plan to partition the hard drive between Slack 9.0 and Windows XP which is already installed on the laptop.

My question is, what is the best software to use to partition the hard drive?

Partition Magic 8 has been recommended but I don't want to shell out another pile of money unless I'm getting the best software.

Thanks for any and all help.

K

I just did this same thing. Mine is a brand new laptop, though, so I didn't lose anything by repartitioning the whole disk. If you have data you need on there I would suggest backing it up and then just using your WinXP disc to repartition just what you need for XP (it's one of the setup steps). Then when you boot w/ your Slackware disc you'll be able to set up the rest of the drive for your Linux install.

My wife insisted that I keep evil on my laptop, so I used ntfsresize; worked great (except it didn't completely remove XP like I would have liked;).
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/...ze.html#static

If you're looking for cheap/free I'm sure one of those nice filesharing programs would have what you're looking for

Thanks all for the help, I'm gonna use ntfsresize.

Another question.

The laptop I'm tryin to install linux on has no floppy drive. While I do know it's possible to do, how do I install linux without the aid of a boot floppy?? Do I use the slack installation cd, or should I try to write a boot-cd, so to speak??

Thanks again for the help.

You can get (or make) a bootable install CD, the Slack install CD may even be bootable.

Reinstall XP before you install Linux. Make XP FAT32. Then you can read/write back and forth. My Win2000 partition is pretty much for backup purposes only.

Although..... backing up on the same physical disk doesn't make much sense.....

Well I got the hard-drive partitioned using (in the end) a combination of the WinXP installation disk and then fdisk. I have an external floppy but linux wouldn't write me a bootdisk so I went ahead and set up LILO.

There is one final problem. When I try to boot slack, it hangs when it finds the usb2.0 device/s. Does anyone know a way around this problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated and thanks again.

It's not clear what the problem is. . . If you can post the error (or boot, if there are no error) messages, that would help us debug. . .