Hi,
Yet another linux newbie looking for advice. ( you've probably heard it all by now! )
Anyway, I have a 55.8Gb Hard Drive currently one partition, with Win XP installed, 1Gb of RAM, AMD Athlon 64 3200, XP currently uses around 25Gb, but that includes around 10Gb of My Documents stuff. Formatted NTFS. I've had enough of reinstalling XP, so want to see what all the fuss is about!
I will be using Mandrake Linux 10.1 Community Edition from a Magazine DVD.
The one point which is stopping me taking the plunge straight away is all the formatting stuff, I have Partition Magic 8 installed and ready to go, but am not sure how to go! I would like the XP partition to be around 20Gb, a second partition for my files would be shared between the two OS's (FAT32?) My Documents will be moved here, which would be around 20GbGb again, and the rest can belong to linux - 15Gb.
I have read a lot of different websites, and topics in this forum, and although they have helped I am still a bit confused, mainly with this screen: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/193/6.gif
How should I go about partitioning the HD, do I reduce the NTFS partition to 20Gb (I will remove My Docs first), create a new partiton for my files in FAT32, and leave the rest untouched, and choose "Use Free Space" in the above screenshot, will the installer do the rest?
How long should this all take, assuming everything goes trouble free?
Sorry for asking such a long question, but I don't want to mess up my system by doing something stupid!
Where is the forum for idiots when you need one!?
Anybody who took the time to read through all of that should get a medal, Thanks.