I used Partion Magic to partition my harddrive. I left the new partition not formatted or unallicated.  Then in the installation process of linux it will give you an option to partition, format automatically on unallicated spaced.

That way I just let Mandrake do everything for me. I know Red Hat will do same and other distros I'm sure will also.

Charles

It is my FIRM opinion that the preinstalled windows partition bites. Not only was my 8500 partitioned NTFS, thus preventing me from using Fips or other open-source disk partitioning software, but it was just too bloated. I myself prefer knowing EXACTLEY whats on my machine.

Thus, 5 minutes after opening the box, I wiped the partition using cfdisk from a knoppix cd. I myself installed slackware first. Got it up and running, then installed windows. After I had everything the way I wanted, I just had to run knoppix again, then lilo from there.

I would recommend that a newbie to linux install windows first. If you don't, you will have a bit of trouble running lilo from knoppix... you have to copy the lilo files and /boot partition to the knoppix distro, as chroot doesn't work properly with lilo.

I recommend looking at linux-laptops.net first. It will help you GREATLY!

Also realize what you're getting into. It may take some time on your part to get your dual-boot system running. You might have to deal with some of your hardware not running automatically under Linux. These are not problems for some people, but are for others. I myself love Linux, but have come to realize it's not for everyone.

Get partition magic,  the newer versions have an option to resize the partition to install another OS. As I use freebsd as my other OS there wasnt an option for it,  but some distros of linux were there. ORRR just use it to resize the current windows partition and use the rest for your linux.

After resizing the NTFS partition, I popped my freebsd install disk in and got to the fdisk portion it showed the already used ntfs partition and allowed me to format the remaining portion freebsd. I dont have a clue about linux though (never have used it) but i do know that resizing a partition for the purpose of installing some form of linux IS an option in partition magic :) ;)