My computer, HP pavilion 8776C, has a massive Hard disk, 36G,more than 4700 cylinders. To install Linux, I moved my FAT32 partition from lower end to upper end (starting from 800 Cylinder), and save space from cylinder 1 to 800 for linux usage. Now my windows works perfect, but I still have trouble to install linux.

I partitioned my hard disk in following way:
cyl. 1 - 10 (20 M): for boot partition, mount point /boot
cyl. 11- 700 (1.7G): for root partition, /
and one swap partition about 100M location from cyl. 701.

But one error happened when i saved my partition information, first it said "No swap partition specified", two options provided: 1) repartition, or 2) skip. if I select repartition, another error message poped up, said "no such a file or directory". it seems to me that fdisk can't retrieve partition information.

Could someone tell me what's the problem and how to fix it. Thanks a lot!

I'm amazed this has been left unanswered this long, but...

The problem is probably that you didn't set the type of the partition to "linux swap" (type 82). It defaults to creating things as just "linux" (type 83).

Use the "t" command in fdisk to specify a partition type. Give it the partition number and then the code when it asks for it. (It reminds you how to get a list of codes if you're not sure.)

Hope this helps,

CHL