Desktop/Intel MOBO 3.3 gig/wd hdd 80 gig/ATI Radeon 200 series.
I downloaded Ubuntu yesterday and have evaluted all my hardware etc. Everything was working OK except a minor resolution problem. So I went for the installation. At partition time I chose option one. Resize HD and went with the recommendation. All went according to Hoyle until it was copying files. It got 42% and froze. I couldn't minimize, shut down installation or even shut down the machine without the off switch on the back. I tried to boot from the hard drive and got the fatal "error loading operating system". I booted using the Live dvd then tried to redo the installation. When I got to the partition screen this time all I got for options were, "erase the whole drive" or manually partition the table. I chose manually as I hope there's still a possibility of saving the windows partition. This is where I just don't have the knowledge to continue. It appears that the drive has been partitioned for linux, but now it wants me to tell it where to mount stuff. I don't even know what stuff is. I took screen shots of the two screens, but have no idea how to post them here. They're saved on my desktop. I see on the right here I don't have permission to post attachments. By the way....I read how to ask a question. I think this explains what happened and what I've done.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. REALLY. I can't live off a live cd.
Thanks again
George

There are many opinions on partitioning but in fact Ubuntu will run well with two partitions. One for swap about double the size of your memory and the other for everything else. The name of the everything partition is "/". If you can see a Windows partition you can leave it as another partition. You can also name the Windows partition as a directory, for example /Win. You can name partitions without reformatting them. Format the "/" partition as Ext3. The swap will choose its format which is different and you don't need to care. When you actually start partitioning, Ubuntu will give you a summary of what it will do and an option to go back and make more changes. Do remember to validate the media before the install when you see the option to do so.

Thanks for the response. On the advise of someone in the newbie forum I ran sudo fdisk -l. Afetr I learned how to do that. These were the results.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 6326 50813563+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 * 6327 9586 26185950 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 9587 9729 1148647+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 9587 9729 1148616 82 Linux swap / Solaris

My one concern with this is that windows reported 66% used during defrag prior to my attempted installation. It looks to me like the 50 gig hda1 may not be enough. Is there a terminal command to tell me how much of hda1 is used and how much is free?
Thanks
George

My suggestion is to go on over to monarch computers web site and check out there prices on a hard drivre that is at least 100 to 160gb. Then install the new drive and set the old one up as yur ide slave and repeat your desired installation.

The command to see percentages of HDD partition useage is df.

Or A cheaper alternative to my prior suggestion is to purchase a tested disc for the correct prossesor type of Ubuntu 6.0.1 LTS from osdisc. Another alternate would be to just eighty six windows all together and dive head long in to linux. My sugesstion for a biginner is to go with a distribution like Xandros or Suse, which you my also find the proper installation discs for on the afformentioned web site.

I agree to skip Windows all together their lack of ethical business practices and cooperation with standards make it difficult for another OS to work with them. That's what I did about 5 years ago and never looked back. My recommendation is to stick with a 32 bit version of what ever distro you wish to try. I doubt you'll be able to discern any performance difference and will avoid the issues that come up when 64 bit versions of things aren't available. An excellent example is the flash plugin. I'd also give a long hard look at Ubuntu. Its the distro I recommend, especially to Windows newbies. Ubuntu support is amongst the best and linuxquestions.org is no exception to that.