stuck on the partitioning stage of install
 

I've tried partitioning multiple ways, but whenever I go into the slackware setup it tells me no linux partitions have been set up.

I have a 200 gb drive with windows xp installed on the first 20 gbs. With fdisk, anything I haven't already partitioned with the windows installer doesn't show up. So I tried it with my windows partition, and then an extended partition on the rest, but fdisk said it was unable to read that.

I also tried making the partitions with the windows installer, but then fdisk doesn't seem to give me any tools to format those so the slack installer will recognize them.

Also looked into parted and fips, but slack doesn't seem to come with them and I see a lot of instructions about how to make a linux boot disk *from inside linux*.

cfdisk errors and i can't use it. maybe my ata controller card gets in its way. i have a promise ultra tx2.

windows xp pro setup has a partitioner built in

the ms version of fdisk cannot see partitions beyond 40gig

if you can get hold of a mandrake disk 1 then the partitioner on that is delightfully easy
the same goes for redhat disk 1

Re: stuck on the partitioning stage of install
 

Is it possible that XP is taking the whole disk?

If you have non partitioned disk space linux fdisk should handle the partitioning of the disk without any problems, just create a new partition for linux and a new swap partition and don't forget to write the changes.

can you get ahold of a bootable slack cd?

how new of a motherboard do you have?

what does your bios post say the size of the drive is?

what does the win fdisk look like as far as partitions and sizes?

As others pointed out:

Do you have any unpartitioned HD space?
If not you won't be able to create linux partitions. When I installed Slackware I had 2 ntfs partitions, so I installed a commercial software (...) to resize those partitions in order to have some unpartitioned HD space. Only after I did this I came to know of the existence of other non-commercial utils to resize partitions, but IIRC you can't do that with ntfs filesystem.

Anyway once you got some unpartitioned space you'll be able to create linux partitions.