I use IBM personal desktop. My hard disk divided into 3 partitions, 1st for XP and installed XP already. Now I want 2nd partition for installing Red Hat but when I install Red Hat, it announces the error at disk partition during installing Red Hat:

"The following errors occured with your partitioning: You have not defined a root partition (/), which is required for installation of Red Hat Linux to continue."

Any ways, I choose Automatically partition or manually partition with disk Druid, it always appears the above error.

Plz give me a hand. Thanks.

Here is the scoop:

Even if you have an existing partition you have to assigna a mountpoint and format the partition you want for RedHat.

When you are in the disk Druid:
- Select the partition you want to use,
- Click the "Edit" button
- From the mountpoint drop down box select the "/" mount point
- Select a file sytem type for the partition (e.g. ext3)

Accept your changes.

Before you go there, reflect on the following:

My recommendation (to take with a grain of salt) is the following:

For a home computer with enough HDD space:

- Leave the XP partition as primary. Good job, don't touch it.
- Create an extended partition that uses the rest of the HDD
- Create a logical partition that you will use as your swap partition at the start of the extended partition. (You did not mention a swap partition. It is quite important. The size depends on your actual ram size. If you have less than 256 MB ram, create a partition as large as your ram. If you have more, create a 512 partition. Of course these parameters depend on what you are using the computer for.
- Create a logical FAT32 partition to use as a shared area for XP and Linux (this may end up being your largest one if you want to store music or videos or thinks like that)
- Create a logical partition for RedHat using the rest of the HDD. (For a linux installtion 10-20 GB is more than enough with plenty of room to grow, specially if you keep your workfiles in the shared partition)

Again, this is what has worked for me. Actually I left some space to install and uninstall other distributions, but that was just a preference.

Other people may recommend you different settings. I like using an extended partition just because that allows me to have more than 4 partitions. (that is the limit for primary partitions, but you can have as many logical ones as you want).

In a nutshell:

1. Create a swap partition !!!!
2. Having a FAT32 shared partition is extremelly convenient.
3. Think your partition layout carefully based on your needs.
4. Again, think your partition layout carefully.

Give Fedora Core 3 or 4 a try instead of trying old Red Hat Linux 9.