installing any linux distro on hard drive with 3 partitions.

[postmanpat16940]

bought a 500 gig hard drive couple of weeks ago. split it into 4 partitions; Vista home premium on 'C' Windows 7 on 'D' Linux (nothing installed) on 'F' and finally Data 'G' which is shown as a logical drive, these others being shown as primary. I would like to install suse 11.1 on the partition shown as 'F' how can I do this. I have 3 gig of ram. The start-up window shows Windows 7 and Vista with up/down cursors to define which system to boot into. Any help gratefully received.

[Jonathan183]

Linux uses device references such as /dev/sda for the first hard drive, /dev/sda1 first partition on first hard drive etc. You will need to format the partition to a Linux filesystem such as ext3 which can be done during the install process.

Be careful as some installers by default will try to use the whole hard drive and overwrite info you want to keep. You will also find that the bootloader by default is installed to the MBR of the first hard drive (usually an internal hard drive) - make sure this is where you want to install the bootloader to.

Backup user data before you start the installation process ... if you need more help with partitioning then boot from a Linux live CD and post the output of

sudo fdisk -l

the -l has a small L rather than a one.

[computerophil]

I had difficulties with Suse and don't like it really. But some tricks generally:
My expirience is that it is much easier if you start a LiveCD and format with the help of GParted before starting the installation Process.
So the danger that it wants to formate all the harddisk is minimized.
Even if you have that much RAM I'd have a SWAP-Partition (maybe not twice the size of RAM but the same size).
For the Linuxdistribution I prefer ext3 as file system.
Please read carefully.

You will have to decide if you want Grub as boot-manager or if you want to stick with windows bootmanager.
The second one at the beginning is more difficult but it is said by germans ubuntu-page its the way of traditionalists and security-fanatics (I think they know me )
Most Linux installation guides will do everything automatic but keep reeding carefully if not you will not understand and problems will be programmed.