Fedora 9 Install Driving Me Mad!!

[smithywill]

Hi

Okay first off i am trying to install Fedora 9 onto my Dell 1530 laptop which currently has Windows Vista home premium installed on it. I would like to install Fedora 9 on a separate partition so i can choose which OS i would like to start when my laptop boots up. I have been trying for ages to get this to work but am having no such luck.

When i get to the partitioning part during the Fedora install it says it cant install on the hard-drive as there is not enough free space even though there is about 135Gb of free space. So instead i choose custom layout to partition the HDD manually. Under the partitioning settings during the install i resized the partition with vista on it to give me about 20GB of free space for Fedora to use. However the install keeps telling me that it will format the partition with vista on, to type ext3 which i don't want as it will delete the vista os...right? So when i change it to use the free space as the root directory it keeps up with an error saying there is a bug!!??

Sorry for the long post but i thought i should give plenty info so you can help me out.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Smithywill

[ub007]

Firstly you say 'there is about 135Gb of free space' n then mention
'during the install i resized the partition with vista on it to give me about 20GB '.Thats confusing.How do you define the free space.In other words,are you saying its free because your not using it...say for example you got a 160 GB hdd installed with Vista and your using 25GB and say there's 135 GB of free space.

If thats the case,its not 'free space' from Fedoras perspective.

On the other hand ,if you got 135 GB of 'unused free space',you could convert that to ext3 and install Fedora on it without any damage to your Vista.But if you convert the existing NTFS partition to ext3,that would affect vista...

Cheers
David

[smithywill]

Firstly you say 'there is about 135Gb of free space' n then mention
'during the install i resized the partition with vista on it to give me about 20GB '.Thats confusing.How do you define the free space.In other words,are you saying its free because your not using it...say for example you got a 160 GB hdd installed with Vista and your using 25GB and say there's 135 GB of free space.

If thats the case,its not 'free space' from Fedoras perspective.

On the other hand ,if you got 135 GB of 'unused free space',you could convert that to ext3 and install Fedora on it without any damage to your Vista.But if you convert the existing NTFS partition to ext3,that would affect vista...

Cheers
David

Hi Dave

I was saying i had 135Gb of free space as i wasnt using it but as you pointed out fedora wont see this as free space. However after i shrink the partition to give me 20GB to use for linux thus reducing my 135Gb to 115Gb for vista. When trying to use this 20gb of free space for fedora by using it as the "/" root directory and formating it as ext3 the installer freezes and says there is a bug and cannot continue!?

Let me know what you think

Will

[ub007]

after i shrink the partition to give me 20GB to use for linux thus reducing my 135Gb to 115Gb for vista

Alrite,so could you plz explain how you did that.
Did you use the in-built Disk Management utility in Vista to shrink the volume?

Use a gparted live CD to do the ext3 partitioning.

Sorry to say,your previous posts do not give a clear enough picture of the state of your hdd.I think it would be a good idea to post your disk partition as seen by the gparted CD.