Quote Originally Posted by ph349397
Ok, so factory installations of XP somehow "use" the whole disk? Wouldn't a defrag solve that problem?
Well you see- wimpdoze is very rudimentary. It always makes one partition on the entire first hard drive. There are ways to circumnavigate this though.

Also, someone suggested that I use qtparted for the repartitioning, does qtparted also format the new partitions for me (as ext3 or whatever)?
qtparted is a frontend for command line partition creation programs. It can make partitions, it can change the size of partitions. Boot the Knoppix cd, open a term and do:

sudo qtparted

Just have a look at what there is to see- it's very easy to understand. If you defrag xp first then it will be able to shrink the partition. It will tell you how much you can shrink it even. It's easy- fire it up already!

Write your partition table down on a piece of paper.

If i had a 40G hdd w/ XP I would do something like this:

Resist the temptation to overwrite xp with Linux, then create the following partition table. This is just an example but tne sizes should work just fine. They don't need to be exact.

/dev/hda1 primary NTFS wnixp 5G
/dev/hda2 primary linux swap 500MB
/dev/hda3 primary linux 3G
/dev/hda4 extended
/dev/hda5 logical linux 4G

Choose /dev/hda2 for your swap when the knx-hdinstall script asks you for it,

Choose /dev/hda3 for /root.

After you install you can make /dev/hda5 your /home partition. (you don't need to worry about it now tho).

Of course- you have plenty of disk real-estate so go ahead and make your NTFS partition as big as you like.

BTW- you don't have to partition the whole drive- you can leave the rest just like it is and do it later. Maybe you'll install another linux distro. I boot 3 distros from my 20G with room to spare. You could set up a fat32 partition and share it with both xp and Linux- .ogg's and mp3's for example or those home movies you made last weekend.

Just be careful with a shared partition. You could easily pass on something to windows that doesn't affect Linux and we all know that windows can crash just fine by itself thank you.

Partitioning is not something that is etched in stone- it's whatever works for you.

After you get your partitions made you can run the knx-hdinstall script from a term as root. You will be given the opportunity to choose your filesystem. I would recommend ext3 or reiser. The script will then format the drives for you. Yes drives- not drive. You should now think of your machine as having multiple drives.