I have a Compaq Pentium 4 that came from the factory with Vista pre-installed. I've partitioned the disk using the Vista tools leaving one Vista partition, one Xandros 3.1 partition, and one Xandros 4.0 partition. Burned the Slackware 11 ISO, but when I try to install, it tells me there is no "Linux" partition and to partition using fdisk. I can't use the menu option during startup (when I hit enter or space on the "Linux partition" line it just sends me to the top of the menu). Can't use fdisk or any other free tool on a Vista machine cause that creates problems. Is there any way to get the Slackware ISO to recognize the existing 12 gig NTFS Xandros 3.1 partition?

You said that the partitions exists already (two additional besides the XP partiton). In this case I never encountered a problem using fdisk (or better: cfdisk). I would not do the other way (create a partition with cfdisk to install XP on it), but IMHO you should be on the safe side, but no guarantees of course.
AFAIK you cannot install Slackware on a NTFS volume. You have to change the partition type to "83" (Linux), then the Slackware installer should pick it up.

Thanks for the prompt reply. I'll repartition with one as "83" first. I'm still a little reluctant to use fdisk or cfdisk as I've experienced problems on my Vista machine due to the new format for the boot record. I know I didn't have much trouble on XP, but Vista seems to be another animal.
Anyway, I'll try it when I log off and let you know how things go.

I can only speak from my XP experiences. So don't blame me if it's not right Maybe some others will come up and post more info/advice.

I used cfdisk to change one of the partitions to "83" but I got an error stating that the write had failed. I did not make the partition bootable in cfdisk, as it was already available from the boot menu, so that may be the problem. I think I will try to make it bootable in cfdisk,. Let you know how it works.

It isn't a good idea to use two different partitioning tools on the same disk. Pick one and stick with it. Personally, I always use "fdisk" from the util-linux package, due to its flexibility.

I've read that because of the changes made in Vista that partitioning with anything but Vista boogers up the boot record, so I used that to make the partitions. Using Vista to partition, EasyBCD to write to the MBR and then installing Linux using the partition boot seemed to work. But Xandros gave me errors and was very unstable, so maybe that wasn't the solution. I already have the partitions, so should I change the format using fdisk? Or delete that particular partition and then re-create it with fdisk?
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Has Vista an ability to format these partitions to ext2/ext3? Or did it left only raw space (unformatted partitions)? You need to format these partitions into appropiate filesystem using linux tools (windows tools, like part magic, usually do their job poorly).

BTW, what is EasyBCD? Some kind of bootloader?

Eh?

If that's the case, they must have changed something between RC2 and the final release. RC2 doesn't behave that way.

I'd try starting from scratch. The first thing to do is to delete all partitions using the same tool they were created with. Then you can use fdisk from the util-linux package to do what you need to do.

The only "trick" is to make sure that you windows partition is marked active (bootable) and is of the NTFS (or FAT32) type. Then, Windows' installer will see it as drive C: and ignore everything else.
Hahaha. I doubt it. Seriously.

So what type did you make your partitions then? Leve it raw if you can. fdisk will take care of everything else.

Thanks, Rkelsen. I'll go ahead and delete the partition and use fdisk to recreate and format it. I'm not sure what the difference is between the Vista pre-loaded on mine but I did have some problems. When I created the partitions, I formatted them to NTFS, and Xandros recognized them, but even their tech guys couldn't get it stable. I'll use the fdisk and get back, thanks!
(Alien Hominid, EasyBCD is some sort of boot utility for Vista, seems to work)

I'd use the windows tools to create the partitions and then use fdisk to change the type for the ones you want to use with Linux.
It may help if you create them as FAT partitions under windows, before changing them to type 83 with fdisk(or 82 for swap)

Put windows on the first partition and have only that partition bootable.
Linux has no problem booting from a non-bootable logical drive in an extended partition. Windows will be happiest if you have a windows-type partition as the first and last partition within the extended partition. It may also be happier if you use the windows bootloader to boot Linux. GRUB may be a better choice than lilo if you are having trouble multi-booting and don't want to use the win bootloader.

Can this Vista bootloader (easyBCD) really boot linux? I can't believe it.

I went into fdisk from Xandros and both the partitions I have for linux are type 83 (also an 82 swap). Forgive my newness, but I'm not sure how to switch the linux loader to GRUB (Xandros is LILO, I think). I'm pretty sure that the 1st partition is Vista, but I'm not sure if the type 83 partitions have the configuration you say. I'd be happy to change anything to get a linux distro working with Vista. Would it help if I pasted the fdisk configuration to a post?

I'm not sure what EasyBCD is but when I first installed Xandros on top of Vista, the Vista option no longer appeared on the boot screen. I used the EasyBCD and could load linux, but I'm still having problems. Here is the link:
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1