I have slackware version 10 on 2 seperate cd's that allow me to boot. I am using an MSI Neo4 nforce SLI mainboard (not platinum) and I cannot get the boot cd's to recognize my HDD to begin installing. The primary partition already had Windows XP on it, but I was attempting to use fdisk or cfdisk to set up the rest of the drive's space for a linux partition. I have never used any flavor of linux before. Please forgive me...LoL

You must use kernel 2.4.32 or kernel 2.6.xx before you can use SATA. You should use distributions like Suse, Fedora, ...

Welcome to LQ then.
I guess you want to setup a dual boot.
Have you got spare space not formated? or are you going to need to resize
partitions. From what you say I understand you have spare space already.
see http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html

there is plenty of dual boot tutorial out there. Here is one
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

Personally, depending on your expertis, and how critical your XP data,
I advise you to 1) consider ad-hoc backups 2) consider adding a 2d HD.
It is much easier / less risky to add another OS to 2d HD.
But this really depends on your expertise.

I do not recommend slack 10 for 3 reasons
- maybe not the best choice for a newbie
- you mainboard look pretty recent, so there might be a sata support problem
- 10.1 and 10.2 are out there

Have you got a sata HD?
You may need to tweak BIOS sata options to have the HD recognised.

If I were you I would first try
Suse 9.3 or 10.0, Mandriva 2005 or 2006 LE, Kubuntu, PClinuxOS...
(look at distrowatch for some ideas and many threads in LQ)

Consider also Knoppix to do the resize or create the partitions in the
spare space. fdisk etc , good idea. You also have GUI (see the ntfs resize link)
and get a feel of Linux,
then just plounge and install whatever distros.
Be sure to make a /home partition
Leave a spare partition (~6 gb) so you can install other distros for trial

Let us know how it goes

AFAIK, Slackware 10 does not support SATA. I have a SATA drive and it was recognized by Slackware 10.2 during installation so I think you can install slackware 10.2 on SATA drive. However, I installed Slackware 10.2 on an IDE drive and am using the fat32 partition on SATA drive to share data with Windows. I've always used separate discs for Win and Linux. That way, I can keep things pretty clean and not touch Windows at all.

Tux,

I'm sorry my first post was not as detailed as it should have been. I definitely need to dual boot. I have been eyeing up some of the other suggestions. I think I'm going to try Fedora first since my friend shane has told me it comes with a lot more stuff preinstalled. I have not really done much with open source before so whatever has the smallest amount of downtime for installing a new OS sounds great. I currently have 1 HD in and ide array that is 30gb. My new drive is a SATA 160 gb drive. I have partitioned only the first 80gb of the drive thus far, and restored an image of my XP OS onto to which I am currently suffering with. The drive I was previously using encountered some physical damage due to my own stupidity, and I attempted to physically solder the connections I had broken. The drive worked, but not reliably. I could format the 2nd drive and put my new OS on that but it will not have the performance or space for software that my new drive does. One last thing I need to appease is the ability to interact with a microsoft network workgroup and domain server. I currently have an old box with winxp2003 server on it that is a domain controller with shared disk space and hosts roaming profiles. All I need is to be able to communicate with the server for printing and accessing its shared volume. I saw that SUSE a product of Novell? and thought it probably wouldn't work. I have some work experience from when I was a teenager working on a novell network and found it is not very compatible with a microsoft network. It's been a while since I have worked with either one outside of my configuration so please correct me where I'm wrong. Thanks again for your time.

Merry Christmas!

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I have installed FC4 with no problems...except I can't get it to boot yet. I end up going straight to windows xp. While installing FC4 the grub screen came up and I selected FC4 as the primary boot OS. The grub boot select screen never shows up at all.

Can you boot now?
If you have installed grub on the boot sector of FC4 partition,
this is good, it is now a question of tweaking ntldr
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

Re network printing and file sharing I cannot help.
i suspect cups and samba are what you are looking for.