Quote Originally Posted by eco2geek
I will respectfully disagree with mzilikazi and state that I think PartitionMagic is a fine program. (Or was, at least, before they sold it to Symantec.) I can say with certainty that it is better than QtParted. And it may not be "better," or give you as many format choices, but it's at least easier to use than cfdisk.
OK sounds like we all agree that Qtparted has some distance to go before becoming a really good tool. Regarding PM perhaps I have a Pavlovian dog type reaction to any non-OSS software. If I had to shrink an NTFS partition then perhaps I would prefer to use PM but I never need to do that because I would never create only 1 partition on an hdd (see my 20G drive partition scheme above). A single partition is one of the silliest thing I've ever heard of but we all know that M$ generally does this. But I digress....

If you formatted your 9GB ext3 partition and your 400MB swap partition (hopefully as primary partitions!) with PartitionMagic before running the Knoppix installer, why are you doing it again with cfdisk?
Presumably the installer is telling him that he does not meet the requirements for installation and forcing him to partition the drive. This is why I feel that the PM created partitions are not very good and should be redone w/ cfdisk.