I have a workstation with three 80Gb ATA HDD.
I only knew this when i tried to install etch. In the 'Disk partition ' during install, it showed these three hard disks.

But back in windows in 'Manage' it shows a 150GB HDD. I partioned it like this..
>> 40GB Primary NTFS. With Win Xp installed
>> two 30GB logical as FAT32.
I left the remaining 50GB for Debian Etch.

But when i tried to install, as i said, i saw 3 HDDs. And no one shows the windows partitions. So i aborted the installation and needs help!!!

What should i do to install a Dual boot machine with Etch and Windows Xp?

And, What is that LVM that comes across when installing Etch?

if you have XP installed on NTFS and FAT32, fdisk will show that while you are installing debian.

also when you state that fdisk is showing 3 HDDs is it like this:

/dev/hda1
/dev/hda2
/dev/hda3

if that is the case you are ONLY seeing 1 drive. hda = first IDE hard drive with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 representing partitions.

so in your above post in how you partitioned the drive it should look something like the following:

/dev/hda1 NTFS
/dev/hda2 FAT32
/dev/hda3 FAT32
/dev/hda4 UNFORMATTED

and depending on if you formatted the last 50G or not will depend on what you see for that.

if that is what you are seeing, then you are golden and just need to break up the 50G partition for linux.

if it were my rig i would partition it as follows for linux:

/boot 128M
/swap (depends on how much RAM you have in the system)
/ 10 - 15G
/home rest of drive space

as for swap i do the following:

from 1 - 512M RAM i go 2xRAM for swap
513 - 786 RAM i go 1.5xRAM for swap
786 - 1G+ RAM i go 512M swap ONLY.

ram is today so much faster then HDDs and if you have enough physical ram, there is little need for swap to take up a lot of space and unlike MS Windows that WAISTS both swap and physical ram linux does not so you do not have the same issues you have with swap under linux as you do in Windows.

good luck.

Thanx for your reply.

I didnt see what you just said...
So, I will give you what i saw.

I put the first cd of Debian and started the installation process(not gui)
Then, the partitioning section came. I opted the manual partitioning and This was what i saw:

SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda)- 80.0 GB ATA WDC WD800ADFD-60
SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sdb)- 80.0 GB ATA WDC WD800ADFD-60
SCSI3 (0,0,0) (sdc)- 80.0 GB ATA WDC WD800ADFD-60

Problem is, as i said, i have 100G of windows partition. And I dot see any windows partition. Even if I select one of the above, it shows 80G free space.
I opened the cabinet to see THREE 80G hard disks.
Is there any way to install ETCH without disturbing my windows Xp?