Problems unpacking Stage3 tarball

[MikeTbob]

Is there a Windows partition on the drive, that you want to keep?

[darthlunchbox]

Yeah, I've got one hard drive partitioned with this setup:
sda1: boot sector
sda2: Windows 7
sda3: Linux

[MikeTbob]

And the hard drive is how big? If you format the sda2 partition, you will lose windows 7. You need / partition and /swap if needed.....you don't really need a /boot partition.
If you don't have enough free space, then you might consider removing the /boot partition and change it to /swap.

[Segfault]

Yeah, I've got one hard drive partitioned with this setup:
sda1: boot sector
sda2: Windows 7
sda3: Linux

Well, the boot sector is the very first sector on hard drive, the one with MBR on it.
You have boot partition. Not sure what's on it. I assume you installed Windows first? Maybe Windows put some it's startup files there, there has to be a reason why it shows up NTFS.
Having /boot partition is not essential, you can do well without it.
With 6 GB of RAM you do not need any swap.

[MikeTbob]

I say, it'd be useful to post the entire output of

fdisk -l

[darthlunchbox]

I've got a terabyte HDD, so I'm not too concerned about running out of space at this point. My fdisk -l output is this:

/dev/sda1   *   1       13       102400      7    HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2       13      61393    493030400   7    HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3       61393   121601   483626208   83   Linux

/sda1 and /sda2 were present before I added the third partition. I did install Windows first, because I know from my little previous experience that it goes through the boot portions of the hard drive and overwrites them.

From what you guys are saying, I can probably just incorporate /sda1 into another partition, say /sda3, and have the computer boot from /sda3?

And also thanks for dealing with my large amounts of n00bish-ness on this. My previous distro was Ubuntu, which glosses over a lot of the mechanics of Linux, that I'm now trying to learn.

[MikeTbob]

I think segfault was right, sda 1 and sda2 are windows partitions. So what I would do is this, create at least one new partition and format it to ext3 or ext4 and it will be /home, you can make it whatever size you like, i'd go with about 10GB. From there, start the install and use only those two partitions.