A beginner's partitioning question

[Andavane]

Greetings

I am a beginner and have read some of the posts and the stickies to be best of my ability.

I have an IBM machine with

"Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 Ghz
2.99 GHz, 0,99 GB of RAM"

It has a 40 GB hard drive running XP Service Pack 2.

A friend has put in a 120 GB HD in a bay formerly occupied by a CD Drive.

This drive has been "Initialized" in Windows, but not yet formatted or partitioned.

My plan is to format the new HD and partition it, which I had first planned to do
using Windows's Disk Management and partition function.

However my friend (who is also interested in learning Knoppix/Linux over Windows)
suggested that it may be a more worthwhile learning experience to format the drive and partition it
using Knoppix. I would then install a different flavour of linux in each partition

I would presumably use the "Qparted" tool, but feel very unconfident in proceeding in something which I do not fully understand.

Could someone point me to a good beginners guide for this, or else give really simple instructions in what to do?

Kind Regards,

John

[Harry Kuhman]

If you are going to use any partition for Windows, then format that partition with Windows. Specifically, don't create or even write to a NTFS partition with Linux.

If, as you seem to indicate, you plan on installing Linux, then yes, you will want to create the partitions with Linux. Microsoft will not create Linux partitions. But I don't see any reason to create them with Knoppix (assuming that you are not foolish enough to want to install Knoppix). Most Linux installers will do this nicely for you as part of the install process. I know that Debian in particular will offer to format the drive and use it; although you sound like you will want to tell it that you only want to use a part of the disk for Debian and save the rest for one or more other OSs. (Also an option). That should be clean and easy to do.

It may be worth mentioning that whatever Linux OS you install first will want to create a swap partition for Linux. You should be able to use that same partition when booting other flavors of Linux, so you should only need one swap partition.

[Andavane]

Thanks very much for this valuable information, Harry.

But I don't see any reason to create them with Knoppix (assuming that you are not foolish enough to want to install Knoppix).

Indeed, I shall not install it.

The plan is to use a section of the drive on which to install Ubuntu. I have the book called Beginning Ubuntu Linux by Keir Thomas, which has a CD in the back, designed to be used whilst working with the book. I'll have a good read of that before actually doing anything. The hope is to be more or less independent from Windows; I think Ubuntu would be the choice here for making the transition.

Once again, thank you for your advice.

Who is the dog in your picture?

Kind regards

John

[Harry Kuhman]

Who is the dog in your picture?

Foo