Can I do a non-destructive partition with CentOS?
 

I have a laptop with an 80gb hdd. Windows is using about 30gb. I would like to add CentOS, in a seperate partion. Can I do that without blowing away the windows partition?

1) Before you try anything, make sure you back up everything. Any partitioning may damage data in an existing install.

2) Defrag the Windows partition, to make sure everything is in one contiguous block at the beginning of the partition.

3) Try the GParted Live CD, which can deal with resizing NTFS partitions. I have not tried with NTFS, but on my machine it did successfully resize ext3 partitions. Basically, you need to shrink the Windows partition and create some free space for Linux to go on.

4) Tell the Linux installer to use the free space on the hard drive. It won't touch the Windows partition, and will appropriately partition the free space into a root partition and a swap partition. I suggest creating a separate partition for /home, which will make life easier if you want to reinstall.

5) As part of the install, Windows should be detected and the GRUB bootloader will be set up appropriately. Let it install GRUB to the MBR, and then you can choose either Windows or Linux when you boot your machine.

Is there any reason you want Centos? Since this is a stable release, it has quite old packages even though they receive security updates. If you want Centos, thats fine, but also consider Fedora Core.

I hope this helps
--Ian