I just recently managed to get suse 9.2 to load yast the other day, after many painstaking hours of troubleshooting, just to bump into yet another problem. I'm beginning to wonder if linux is really worth the effort.

When I try to install, it states something along the lines of "Yast cannot create partition, please do so using other means."

Now, does anybody know if there is a way around this? If not, does anybody know a good tutorial for 'diskpart', the partition program that comes with xp? I had look at it, and it isn't as simple as it looks. Why they couldn't just stick with fdisk, i don't know.

Any help will be most appreciated

sam

You should not make that decision this soon. You have not even tried lots of other popular distro's that might have a lot less bugs than SUSE.

What exactly do you mean by this? All I understand is that you want to partition your Hard drive. Why not use the SUSE partitioner, or use some live CD distro that lets you partition drives.

Remember, don't give up on linux. M$ is not the answer. M$ is the question, Linux is the answer.

Sorry, I should of explained myself a bit more clearly. I tried the partitioner that comes with yast, and there is no way I can get it to work, telling me to format the drive using my own means. This probably due to my main partition being a microsoft reserved partition. Do you know of any 3rd party partition programs that could do this? Or if there is a way to get the partitioner in yast to overcome the microsoft reserved partition?

I did use linux a lot on my old pc. I found it rather good, however performance issues let it down, probably becuase of my archaic hardware. I haven't given up on linux just yet, I was just a bit frustrated at the time of the previous post.

Usually the YaST installer handles Windows partitions very well. You simply need to defragment the drive, to allow YaST to shrink empty space. If there are fragments left, YaST (or better parted) can't use this space. Another point is that YaST works better on empty space. It is more complicated to use existing partitions. I am not sure how the option is named exactly, but there should be some kind of 'Expert Partitioner' in YaST, that allows you to make custom changes.

Please allow me one question: on what kind of problems did you spend so many hours of troubleshooting? I could understand that getting used to Linux may be troublesome, but you seem to be at a stage that simply requires booting from CD.

I was trying to get yast to work in 64bit mode. It screen just went blank, and the system speaker beeped, as soon as it said 'loading yast'. However that is all sorted now, after nearly a week of searching forums. I've also found out how to use microsoft diskpart, so I'll probably make the partition in that, and just install linux into that.

The entire pc had just been formatted also, so I wouldn't of thought defragmenting would of such a big difference. I'll try it anyway though

Thanks for your help.

the way windows places files within partitions,even after a fresh install,defragging does make a difference.a problem may arise however if there in a non-movable file placed near the end of the partition.if this is the case,you may not be able to free enough space to install to.the simplest solution would be to leave unpartitioned space while doing the windows install.