Partitioning a HD

[mimes]

Hi, I have never partitioned a harddrive before, and when it was time to use QT Partitioning thingy, I already had 4 partitions on the harddrive. The main one that contains my old windows 98 system, had like 9GB on it. I reformatted it to a Q3 linux filesystem. I used the other 2GB one for my linux swap, and I also have another partition that has a very few GB on it and one that is empty. They are lined up as follows:
-The non used "free", few GB's one
-The main Linux one
-The Swap
-The empty, useless, "free" partition
I saved the changes, and tried to continue the installation for Knoppix, but it once again said i needed to partition the HD. Then i used the IGNORE_CHECK=1 thing to skip the hd thing. I tried to start the installation, but it ended up giving me a printer error thing in a big standalone window. I said next, then it closed the installation. Please help!! I am an extreme newbie.

[firebyrd10]

Hi, I have never partitioned a harddrive before, and when it was time to use QT Partitioning thingy, I already had 4 partitions on the harddrive. The main one that contains my old windows 98 system, had like 9GB on it. I reformatted it to a Q3 linux filesystem. I used the other 2GB one for my linux swap, and I also have another partition that has a very few GB on it and one that is empty. They are lined up as follows:
-The non used "free", few GB's one
-The main Linux one
-The Swap
-The empty, useless, "free" partition
I saved the changes, and tried to continue the installation for Knoppix, but it once again said i needed to partition the HD. Then i used the IGNORE_CHECK=1 thing to skip the hd thing. I tried to start the installation, but it ended up giving me a printer error thing in a big standalone window. I said next, then it closed the installation. Please help!! I am an extreme newbie.

Q3 filesystem?

I've never seen that before, but knoppix needs ext3 or resisefs

[rich55]

your swap is probably too big. If i remember correctly, it should be about 2x your RAM, up to about 500MB.

[mzilikazi]

Hi, I have never partitioned a harddrive before, and when it was time to use QT Partitioning thingy, I already had 4 partitions on the harddrive. The main one that contains my old windows 98 system, had like 9GB on it. I reformatted it to a Q3 linux filesystem. I used the other 2GB one for my linux swap, and I also have another partition that has a very few GB on it and one that is empty. They are lined up as follows:
-The non used "free", few GB's one
-The main Linux one
-The Swap
-The empty, useless, "free" partition
I saved the changes, and tried to continue the installation for Knoppix, but it once again said i needed to partition the HD. Then i used the IGNORE_CHECK=1 thing to skip the hd thing. I tried to start the installation, but it ended up giving me a printer error thing in a big standalone window. I said next, then it closed the installation. Please help!! I am an extreme newbie.

It would be best if you posted specific info about your partition table. You can do this rather easily w/ an app called fdisk. Open a terminal, become root and issue:

fdisk -l /dev/hda
Or it is possible that your drive is /dev/hdb. Copy and paste the output of fdisk -l /dev/hda please.

Try to be specific and post actual errors (copy & paste) or it is very difficult to help you learn how to partition a drive. Oh and BTW - forget qtparted and use a real partitioing tool like fdisk or cfdisk which is very easy to use.

[mimes]

Alright, I'm sorry for being so vague before. When I type "cfdisk" in superuser mode, I get the error:
FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition begins after end-of-disk.
Press any key to exit cfdisk
When I type "cfdisk" in a regular shell, it gives me the error:
FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive
When I type the command df, to find more about my filesystems, I get:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 3471 1109 2362 32% /
/dev/scd0 716308 716308 0 100% /cdrom
/dev/cloop 1943588 1943588 0 100% /KNOPPIX
/ramdisk 145928 2244 143684 2% /ramdisk
AND when I try to use QTParted to delete and manage partitions, the program opens, but I can only do a few limited things.
Any help would be really appreciated, I am a Linux newbie who wishes to help others someday. :D