Quote Originally Posted by ph349397
Now I'm challenged with installing Knoppix 3.2 on my girlfriend's brand new Toshiba Satellite laptop, which of course has an NTSF formatted hard drive (40 gigs). This is what I've picked up upon skimming other posts dealing with installing on an NTSF formatted HD:
Defrag xp first and of course- if you really really need it whatever it is, data, mp3's photo's whatever- back it up first. Of course you can use Knoppix for that too.

1. Upon booting and running Knoppix from the CD drive, utilities can be run in order to divide the existing partition on the HD into multiple partitions.
qtparted (as root) is one bad-mofo- check it out.

2. It is possible to leave WinXP untouched, and the resulting partition that WinXP is on will of course remain formatted as NTSF. The new partition(s) that Knoppix will occupy will have to be formatted ext3.
Sure it's possible. I doubt that she's already used 40G worth of hard drive. You can use ext3 or Reiser or xfs filesystems- there are others too. ext3 is fairly well tested and worthy- reiser is nice too- I have been using both.

I always write my partition tables down on paper as they can get fairly complicated and it's nice to have a reminder just before you commit to writing a new partition table or filesystem

I would make two partitions for Knoppix at least, one for /root and one for /home plus you're going to need to read a little about LILO man lilo and there are alot of how-to's out there. LILO is the bootloader BTW. Do a search here on the site too.