Help Me!! Need help formatting my Hard Drive
 

im a new Linux user and am having trouble figuring out how to format my hard drive for Slackware 10.2 and also with OpenSUSE 10.1. Help!!:confused:

ok, linux has fdisk, cfdisk and other utilities...

But, first, how far have you progressed in your install(s)?

I.e., is any of SuSe or slackware installed already?

Is there anything on the drive you need to save?

ive downloaded the iso's of the internet and checked them for corruption. I have also burned the Cd's. Nothing needs to be saved and i haven't installed the OS's yet.

ok, both slack and suse have partitioning software for use during install built in. Go with Suse first because it's a bit more user-friendly in the interface. There are different schemes for partitioning but a basic one to start with is:
/dev/hda1 /boot 75MB
/dev/hda2 / 3GB
/dev/hda3 swap twice_your_ram
/dev/hda4 <- make this "linux extended" (i think it's type 85) and then add as many addtional partitions in this as you need.
(rest of disk) leave for other install

get one distro running, and then inside it run a partition tool on the rest of the disk to prepare for the second install.

Actually LVM is better than going with an "extended " partition but that's a complete lesson in itself.

Thanks! Helped a lot!