absolute noob with BASIC questions

[flyingsolo]

I want to experiment/learn some Linux by installing to an old Win98 laptop with very basic 6G drive and only 64M RAM. No need to keep anything on it--long since moved on.
My trouble is with fdisk. The C drive consumes the whole drive space and I want to reformat with partitions for Linux as per instructions elsewhere (swap, boot, usr, etc) but fdisk won't let me delete the current, single partition. "Could not change partitions, b/c the disk could not be locked"
Am I missing something basic? Please point me to info if available. I'm stuck before starting!
Thanx.

[lakerdonald]

Which distro are you trying to install?

[flyingsolo]

Suse 10 from Novell; downloaded; maybe a bit rich for the resources of this old laptop.

[AlexK]

Just boot from the installation media and SUSE should automaticially format stuff for you.

A word of warning though, you might want to have atleast ~500MB of swap space when running SUSE on such old hardware. Just set whatever partition sizes you want in Yast's partitioning section of the install.

[flyingsolo]

I have switched boot order to boot from CD where Suse is and it looks promising at first but then Suse asks for partition to load to, which doesn't exist b/c Win98 has the whole drive as one partition for itself. So I understand this to mean I have to create the partitions first for Suse to use. Basically, I don't understand then what you mean by 'Just boot from the installation media...'
I thought fdisk would allow me to create partitions but it seems to block these attempts. I am not trying to dual boot but instead repartition the drive for Suse--I don't care that the old Win98 and old data files are lost.

[Muser]

The install CD should have utility to reparition the hard-drive, automagically.

[AlexK]

With older hardware, SUSE finds that it doesn't have enough ram and asks which partition it should use as swap.

Since you are using Win 98, get a DOS program called FIPS which you can repartition your Primary partition. Using FIPS create 2 partitions 1 windows, 1 small one for SUSE say around 500MB or so. Now try booting from SUSE and tell it to use the smaller partition as SWAP. Then during the install create the new partitions as required.

One thing you should know about FDISK, you can't use it while Windows is running. So you have to boot into full DOS mode to use it.