Hello all,
I just got a new Dell and the first thing I'm going to do is wipe the hard drive clean. I don't want all the extra Dell crap and Windows XP tweaks that they do. From there, I want to install the fantastic openSuse 10.2, and Windows XP (from a non-Dell XP disk).

How do I go about partitioning the hard drive and installing the operating systems so that they get along together when installing to a fresh hard drive?

Thanks much for your time.


--Note: I just saw the 9.1 sticky. I'm looking into it now.

Yup, definitely do a bit of browsing around here -- all the info you need is very close at hand.
Basically, wipe the hard drive, make your NTFS, Linux, swap, and any other partitions you want.
Install Windows FIRST for simplicity, and at the front of the hard drive.
When that's all done, Install SuSE.

Use Gparted, from a live linux CD or from the Gparted stand-alone CD ISO you can download and burn, to do your partition creation & editing efficiently and reliably.

Best of success!

These may be useful:
Booting
Partitions

Its a lot more simple than that, you don't need to plan your partitions etc.

Just wipe the hard disk and load up xp using a normal oem cd and the license key on the back leaving half the disk empty. ie: i dual boot vista and suse on a 60gb disk so i load windows on to 30gb leaving 30 gb spare. Once you've done that just boot to the suse disk and load it up. If you accept the reccomended partition settings it will automatically use the remianing space and take the mbr allowing dual boot.

But still...

I would recommend partition plan. It will avoid trouble in the future(usually of space).And I have had this problem..

My recommendation is:
5GB NTFS for windows
1GB swap
10GB for Linux System
The rest is for storage in ext3, and make Ext2IFS read/write access to it.download here:http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html

I just put 10.2 on to my PC. Make sure windows is installed 1st and leave a bit of free space on the disk, say 10 gig. Then boot with the 10.2 disk and it'll handle the creation of your new partitions, swap space etc. And it'll sort out the mbr for dual boot too (on the install you should see \hda allocated to c:\windows.)

You might want to splash out some extra cash and get acronis disk director and boot manager (it's simply the best software out there for managing partitions and dual boot).

10.2 looks excellent, and I've had no issues so far.

Thanks for the great feedback! It seems pretty straight forward. Now I just need time. hehe. I'll post if anything comes up.

Thanks again