Reformatting question

[lwpack]

Hello everybody. I'm in the market to buy a new computer (looking at Dell's E521) and want to set up at Vista/Linux dual boot. I just spoke with Dell and asked them if they could refrain from installing Vista for me and leave the hard drive unpartitioned and unformatted. They said no. So when I get the computer it will be 250GB of NTFS. I know there is some way of reducing the Windows partition to make room for Linux, but I'd really prefer to start from scratch with an unpartitioned, unformatted hard drive. So, how do I:
1. Uninstall Vista?
2. Delete any partitions Vista created?
3. Undo the NTFS formatting?
If I do succeed in doing this is there still going to be remnants of the NTFS file system that might make things difficult to create a FAT32 or ext3 partition? Thanks for the help.

[tech_man]

Use Gparted.

[devils casper]

hard drive. So, how do I:
1. Uninstall Vista?
2. Delete any partitions Vista created?
3. Undo the NTFS formatting?
If I do succeed in doing this is there still going to be remnants of the NTFS file system that might make things difficult to create a FAT32 or ext3 partition?

as already suggested by tech_man, GParted is one of the best Partition Manager.
no need to uninstall Vista/delete NTFS partitions.
boot up from GParted CD, shrink NTFS partitions and create unpartitioned/free space.






Casper