Another dual boot question

Hey everyone. I searched around the forums, but was unable to find an answer to this (close, but not quite!). Right now, on my Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop I have a 55.8 GB hard drive, with 17 GB free (should be more soon...going to get an external HD to dump stuff to - any reccomendations?).

Anyways, I would like to know if it is possible to dual boot some linux distro onto it without loosing any of my data, or my current windows install. I believe right now it is just one large partition, as that is how dell ships it.

If it is possible, how would I go about doing it? Is it just as easy as putting another partition on there? How large should that partition be to allow me to continue to be able to download files without running out of space in either windows or linux?

Thats all that I can think of right now, but I am sure there are some that I am missing. :)

Thanks in advance for any help!

If that 17GB of free space is unformatted, then it's easy as adding a few Linux partitions in the installation of whichever distribution you choose (a / and swap partitions at least). If that's 17GB of free Windows-formatted space, you need a third party application such as Partition Magic to resize it.

If you don't want to pay for Partition Magic, you'll probably have to reformat your entire hard drive and reinstall Windows on a smaller partition. An alternative is to use GNU Parted, a free partition manipulating program. But you can only resize FAT partitions, so if you have NTFS, you're out of luck.

System Rescue CD (see signiture) can resize NTFS.

Ok, so just to double check before I try this, I can use the system rescue cd to resize my current windows partition (basically everything on the hd right now), then I should add to more (just in the space that isnt currently occupied) - one for swap, and one for /? How big does the /, and swap have to be? Thanks a lot!

Actually QtParted can resize NTFS. And there are distros out there that can resize NTFS during the install, Suse, Knoppix and Mepis are just a few.
And if I read your post correctly , that 17 GB is part of the 56 GB on the hard drive, meaning you have used 70% of the drive already and you only have 30% free space.
You definitely will want to get a new hard drive if you want to install Linux to.
/ should be a minimum of 5 GB and depending on how much ram you have, this could take up 500 MB to 1 GB.
But with this small size for /, later on you probably won't be to hapy with it, I would start with at 15 GB for /.

How much RAM do you have?

I have 512 mb RAM. Thanks!