Quote Originally Posted by LinuxN00b_X3
i have Knoppix 3.6 downloaded to a cd-r. i have installed it before and dont recall the command to do it. i need to repartition the drive as well, i am running a 1.4ghz 256m ddrram 40 gb hd laptop that has a serious error on it.. i can run all the programs from CD with no problems.. but if i go in and try to reinstall windows (or format to Fat32/NTFS) i get a critical error and the sytem shuts down. personally i think it has something to do with all the crap microsoft has in their programming. personally a Linux Laptop sounds good to me too so... yeah. at any rate.. i would appreciate any help the forum could give me for support..

MCSE turncoat to Linux,
LinuxN00b_X3
It sounds like your HD partition table is corrupted if you cannot format the HD . Can you read anything on the HD?
If the partition table is corrupted you will have to rebuild the partitions with fdisk. You can use Windows fdisk but if you are going to HD install Linux you might as well use Linux to partition the drive. Linux has three partitioning tools, fdisk, cfdisk & QTparted. QTparted is the easiest if it will read the HD OK, fdisk is the one which will work for sure.
The onething to watch with Linux fdisk is that it canl make overlapping partitons if you are not careful so the surest way is to leave a little dead space between the partitions then fill these in later with QT parted.
For a dual boot 40 Gig system I suggest:
1. 3-6 Gig for windows operating system (depends on what version of win)
2. 4-5G for Linux operating system
3. 300-500 Meg for swap file
4. All remaining space for data. Keep your data separate from you O/S so you won't lose it if O/S crashes. Format vfat then both windows & linux can use this drive.