Well I am starting a change over from Fedora to Ubuntu. So I wipe my HD clean Windows and Fedora in all. I normally install XP first so Grub can take over. Well I went to install XP on just the 20 gigs of free space I left over, and the XP installer wont let me because of the partition setup.

So screw it, I have hit a point where I am comfortable enough to go strictly Linux, even though I wont be able to play many of my windows only games.

I have this 20 gigs of unpartitioned space laying out on my HD. How do I go about partitioning it, formating it and mounting it? (I am not using LVM, just plain partions for /, /home, and swap)

In the terminal as root...

Use fdisk or cfdisk to partition.

Use mke2fs to format as ext2, mke2fs -j for ext3, mkreiserfs for reiser, mkfs.xfs for xfs, and mkfs.jfs for jfs.

Create a mount point with mkdir /whatever and then use mount /dev/hd?? /whatever to mount it. Edit the file /etc/fstab to automatically mount the new partition(s).

XP would have required a primary partition.
Usually using logicals is fine for Linux.
Depending on how your current setup is structured, you may not be able to use that space at all.
Let's see the output from "fdisk -l"

Please clarify: You said you wiped the disk and then you said 20G of unpartitioned space. What is the total size of the disk and what is on it?

When you install (anything) you should have the option of deleting and creating partitions.

How do I do the syntax for mke2fs, I try this:

and I get no such file or directory.



Sorry for taking FOREVER guys, but work has been hell that last few weeks with having catastrophic error happening on our comm equipement.

Did you try to run mke2fs as root or as normal user? You should be root to do this.
If you get this error as root try
# whereis mke2fs
which will probably return something like /sbin/mke2fs
Try running it with the full path.