Partitioning

[Olicommunist]

I have spend hours trying to partition my disks so that i can install Knoppix but everytime I use qtparted and resize the partitions and press okay a blank box appears with an exclamation mark and no writing in, obviously i'm not doing something write. I've tried using cfdisk to partion but I'm not sure how if its possible to resize the partions as I want to be able to dual boot. Someone please help!

[devils casper]

post your exiting partition structure here. execute this

su
fdisk -l

post output here.

[Olicommunist]

I did what you said and this is what I GOT

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 11 88326 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 * 12 4471 35824950 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 4472 4863 3148740 db CP/M / CTOS /

Hope that helps, i'm desperate!

[Olicommunist]

Hey I've just run qtparted and it seems to be working fine now, but i'm still not sure what I should be doing, I can only partition my main disk into two, one for windows and the other for Linux, do I then have to partition the Linux partition to make the swap file or ...

[devils casper]

delete new partition and leave space as free/unpartitioned. select 'Free/Unpartitioned space' in Partition section during installation. Linux Installer will create and format neccessay partitions out of free space.

[Olicommunist]

I haven't yet created the new partition as I haven't commited to the changes yet, I've just reduced the size of the windows partition, when I click on commit it says something about making sure the disk isn't busy and having to dismount partitions?

[devils casper]

you have to unmount all partitions first.
i would suggest you to use GParted LiveCD for partitioning. its one of the best partition manager and has user friendly interface. size around 30 MB only.

[Olicommunist]

When you download that do you have to burn it to a disk or something? Can I use that to unmount my partitions or can I use knoppix?

[devils casper]

you have to burn downloaded .iso image to disk.

Can I use that to unmount my partitions or can I use knoppix?

first of all, execute 'df -h' command and check which partitions are mounted.
execute umount /dev/<partition> to unmount partition.

[Olicommunist]

root@Knoppix:/ramdisk/home/knoppix# unmount/dev/sda2
bash: unmount/dev/sda2: No such file or directory

this just happens everytime, so I have to dismount all partitions, then i presume when i've dismounted them and resized the windows partition I will have to mount them all again? I really dont know why i'm making it so difficult to install knoppix.