Hi there,

I am new at this however I think I can give you a quick helping hand. The most important part of your post in my estimation is the last part. You received a message stating that the partition had a rather strange lay out. I am guessing you started with one partition and made it into two.

Windows doesn't treat its filesystems very well (imho) and fragments things all over creation. Thus before you partition you will want to run a full defragmentation cycle on your windows system in order to get all the information into one part of your harddrive. Then partition. Now you have already partitioned... so I am not exactly sure how this will behave. I would suggest deleting the one partition which you were going to install Linux on making a single partition with your current windows installation. Run defrag thoroughly. Then try to repartition again and see if the error doesn't disappear.

That being said let me give a word of warning. When messing with Windows... remember to make a VERY THOROUGH BACKUP before trying any of this. That way if the whole thing blows up you will be able to restore it and try again. NEVER try this without a BACKUP!! It's dangerous... it's stupid... it gets very old to read about on newsboards like this one... PLEASE BACKUP WINDOWS!!! before doing anything else. In fact right now turn off IE (or whatever browser you are using) and backup... then comeback and try the rest... Good luck!