Hello and thanks in advance for any help recieved.
I have 2 Hard Drives , the first Primary has windows xp home installed.
The second is just for storage and it is 80GB, On this drive I have just made a new partition(15GB) with Partition magic, and created a specific Linux partition,now how do i go about installing Suse 9.1 Personal Ed. in this particular partition space.
And how do i get it to boot to this partition to do the install,I have read that Suse Linux just over rides your hard drive on install ,How can I avoid this? I dont want to lose any data on my first drive or any data on my second drive,is this possible?
I am using the downloaded Iso of Suse 9.1 which burnt fine using Nero.
Thanks again Aussie

No need to worry. The Suse setup and configuration tool (Yast) will propose a re-partitioning of your hard disk(s), but of course you can have it installed in the partition you freed. If you're familiar with partitioning, this won't be hard at all.

To do the install, boot from your cdrom. No changes will be made to your HD until the configuration has been done.

Thanks Celettu for your fast reply, I installed last night without a problem ,as you said and using partition magic to create a specific linux partition seems to be the way to go because it detected it fine.
Havn't had much time yet to fiddle with it but it looks great and seems to very fast compared to Win xp
Once again Thanks

You're welcome

I hope someone can help me with this...

I also have XP currently but want to move into Linux. I am trying to install Suse 9.1 Personal which I found on the Suse site.
I am trying to install it onto a second drive therefore set that drive as the primary drive (disk0) with a FAT32 partition and went through a number of instructions I found within the folllowing link:

http://susefaq.sourceforge.net/faq/inst_winxp1.html

Upon trying to boot from CD I am getting an error asking me to:
'Remove disks or other media.
Press any key to restart'

...which upon pressing will take me straight into windows, bearing in mind that the BIOS is set to detect CD ROM only and there is no other disk in but the 9.1 CD.
From the Suse site there seems to be one ISO of 702Mb which I have burned onto CD. I seem to notice information of other disks in various sites, however I cannot see any others on the Suse site other than the main 9.1 personal ISO. I am guessing this is due to the retail version, however please inform me if I am wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Lee

Is there any real reason you want to change the hard drives around.
I didnt bother because Suse gives you the option of setting the Boot up ,to which ever Os you want to use as default boot or gives you about 10 seconds to click to the other Os,very easy to configure these settings.
I'm not 100% sure,but by changeing your Disk to primary 0 may be causing the problem.
Also, I used a partition tool, Partition Manager 5.5 from paragon , these kind of tools give you the option of making a specific Linux partition Ext2 or Ext3 or Reiser , and a Swap partition of about 550MB or whatever size ,I think Linux uses this for memory.
Also , just a thought, did you use an ISO burning program to burn your cd , or just simply copy the downloaded file directly to disk,Which I've heard of being done, this wont work because its still in a compressed state. I use Nero 6.0 ISO burner, but there heaps of different Programs to do it with and heaps of good Information on how to burn ISO's by searching www.google.com or even on this site.

Hope some of this helps.

Your "thoughts" are good Aussie_Ocka, I burned it will Nero and it worked a treat, thanks very much.

I am now in another dilemma however, when running through the installation I worry also about losing my data which I have built up for many years. I noticed that for the partition section the general format was:

Resize windows partitition C: (/dev/hda1) from 18.6GB to 6.2GB
Create Swap partition 1.0GB 11.4GB (/dev/hda4 with reiser)
Set mount point of /dev/hda5/windows/E
Set mount point of /dev/hda6/Windows/F
...etc

Will these set mount points reformat these drives? If so how can I get around it so that the only drives that are being affected are a FAT32 and a Linux Ext2 drive (which I made from the 18.6GB drive above)? or have I done something wrong here...

Again many thanks...

On the already-resolved CD issue, the CD may either have not been written with the correct ISO9660 standard, or it may not have been properly created as bootable; I'm guessing the latter.

Here is one piece of advice that is always valid: If you have any valuable data on disks which are are re-partitioning, BACK UP YOUR DATA FIRST. In your case this may be a simple case of burning 1 or 2 CDs with just the relevant work files, not the whole drive. You never know when a PEBCAK* error may occur and innocently wipe or ruin a partition.

Here is some evidence that indicates that SUSE 9.X knows how to non-destructively re-size Windows XP partitions:
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/...e.html#example
"One of the leader Linux vendors. It was recently acquired by Novell. YaST integrated ntfsresize and made non-destructive NTFS partitioning automatic and user-friendly since SUSE 9.0. Warning: SUSE 9.1 might create unbootable Windows partition."

Here unbootable means unbootable by Windows, I suppose. That certainly doesn't mean unreadable, so it should remain easy to recover the data.

Your posts are causing me some confusion here, because on the one hand, you say you're installing on a second drive (which I understand as a separate physical hard-drive), but at the installation you're saying that it wants to re-size your Windows partition.

If you don't have one, my personal recommendation (for whatever that's worth) is to invest ~$100 in a large, second hard-drive. This will allow you to keep Windows and Linux separate in terms of disk drives, in my opinion a good thing. You can thus install Linux in partitions on the second drive and also keep partitions on that drive to back up data.

* Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard

oh Im sorry about that, I will give you the lowdown of how my architecture is:

I have 2x 120Gb hard disks.
HHD(0) currently has one partition of FAT 32, another of Ext2, both empty; and 2 more of NTFS format with data on them.
HHD(1) is partitioned 4 times in NTFS format, includes windows and works fine. *BIOS set to boot HDD(1)

I basically want to be sure that when I hit install in Suse Personal 9.1 it is not going to rewrite all partitions with Linux format partitons and erase what is on not only this drive but my second drive also.
I say this as it shows every drive on the partition list during the Suse install with the format you see below...

Resize windows partitition C: (/dev/hda1) from 18.6GB to 6.2GB
Create Swap partition 1.0GB 11.4GB (/dev/hda4 with reiser)
Set mount point of /dev/hda5/windows/E
Set mount point of /dev/hda6/Windows/F
and so on...

where E, F etc are the drives as identified by windows. This maybe down to my lack of knowlege on mount points and their limits regarding how they will affect a disk drive and partitions.
If I can be assured that pressing ok will not harm these drives then by all means I am happy but my concern is I am going to be left with nothing but white space, and a nice install of Suse.

Thanks for your help though, its all good to me!

Lee , yes this

is telling you what it will do if you dont edit your partition information.In the window that this is shown, (going from memory of my install)you will see an option to make Edit partition changes,
in here you can edit or pick which partitions you want to use or format.

I have my hard drive0 with windows XP only,then a seperate Hard drive1 with 2 linux partitions + SWAP partition of about 550mb ,which is heaps,and 1 fat32,
the set mount point is set to my windows xp installation C: on hard drive 0.
It gives you the option of resizing any of these partitions.
Please take michapma advice on backing up your data, because its very easy to lose it all, I used partition magic the first time I partition my drive and installed suse, and it somehow joined all my partitions together and made them 1 big BAD partition, I then had to use another tool called Swissknife and delete it (partition magic wouldnt let me delete it) and this happened twice,so I figure its a problem with partition magic , because I've since used partition manager 5.5 and had no ill effects.

I'm no expert, but I hope this helps some.

Lee-
SuSE is (IMO) almost foolproof, provided you read everything on the screen. When doing anything configuration-wise it always has a window on the left side of the screen with explanations of the different options. Read those as you do things. If you're worried about losing your data on the c drive, just tell it not to resize it. If you do in fact want to resize a windows partition, you first must defrag it. This will pile all the info to the beginning of the drive and then you can reduce the amount of unused space, essentially.

You can select which boot record to write to (hdd 0, hdd 1, MBR, Superblock, etc) in the SuSE installer, it's under the link at the bottom of the config page with the other boot loader options I believe.

STuPiDiCuS