newbie needs guidence

[hazardous]

as i want to use linux, i will probobly get slack, but now the issue im trying to resolve is that i need to partition my harddrive to run both os's, of course i have windoze 98se which is expected. though my question is where can i get a free partitioner or can someone tell me how to do it manually? after that im sure more questions from myself will start to flow like crazy considering im a newbie. thank you, any help will be greatly appriciated

[gzunk]

Do you need to resize your existing Windows partition or do you mind it getting blown away? I.e. do you mind re-installing Windows and your windows applications?

I haven't heard of a free application that can resize partitions, although a quick google search may turn something up. If you don't mind trashing everything then you can use fdisk as provided by Windows to partition your drive or the various fdisk programs under linux (I would recommend cfdisk - it's text based but with a user interface of sorts)

[Zig]

Some of the linux distros come with a partition tool in the installation process. You can resize your win98 partition and install linux in the free space left. You must defrag your disk with win98 before install linux. I think mandrake and redhat have this tools. I dont know if other distros have any.

[nikhil]

ur best bet wud be to use partition magic or some other tool , partition your hard disk ,put the linux cd in and boot through it and install linux on the new partition..its simple and fast...
you can get the latest version of partition magic on kazaa or some other software...

[Dolda2000]

I don't think that RedHat does. I know that the latest releases of Mandrake do, though, from references on the forum. Other distributions I do not know about.