Problem in RHEL 5.1 Server installation

[AchyuthaRao]

Hi,
I have a 320 GB hard disk, of which 280 GB is already used by installing a Windows XP OS. My intention is to have RHEL 5.1 Server (32 Bit) installed on top of Windows XP and hence have a dual boot system.
In the remaining 40 GB space, I wanted to install a RHEL 5.1 Server.
But when I selected GUI mode of installation, I get this message:
(Only last three lines are given here...could not recollect the display on the entire screen)
-------------------------------------------------------
ACPI: Interpreter enabled
ACPI: Using 10APIC for interrupt routing
ACPI: PCI Port Bridge [PCI0] (0000:00)
-------------------------------------------------------
I tried with many other options like "linux noprobe", "linux text", "linux resolution=1440x900", "linux skipddc", etc but none of them worked. "linux resolution=1440x900" option did take me further in the installation process, but it stops at the "Select Language" screen and the keyboard / mouse is non-functional at this point. The rest of the options mentioned above all lead to the hang screen carrying the error message given above.
My system's hardware configuration:
Intel Core 2 Duo
E8200 2.66 GHz
2 GB RAM
x-86 based PC
Kindly resolve my proble, since I haven't been able to dual boot with Windows XP and Linux on my PC.

[KingX]

First thing I want to clarify is did you create 2 paritions on your hdd when you installed XP? Seems to me that 320 gb is the advertised capacity of your drive.. not it's actual capacity. Hard Drive manufacturers use 1000MB = 1GB conversion while OS's use 1024MB = 1GB conversion. So your 320GB drive isn't actually a 320GB.. it's around 290ish GB.. or even less. So first go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management and see how much free space you have on your drive (it should be gray'ish color).

If that is the case (that you don't have any room to install Red Hat) then you would first need to create a partition by shrinking your XP partition (back up important data first). Then you would be able to install Red Hat on that free space. Let me know if I am wrong in my diagnose

And I would also recommend grabbing a live distro cd like puppy or knoppix to see if they boot fine on your system. It could be the case that the CD/DVD that you are using to install Red Hat is corrupted or damaged.

[AchyuthaRao]

Thanks for your quick reply, KingX!
I have made an attachment to this reply post with the name "free_space".
As evident from this screenshot, I indeed have a 320GB hard drive, of which around 38 GB is still free. And it is in this free space that I was trying to install the RHEL5.1 Server.
To my knowledge, the DVD would'nt be corrupt, because I just then had burnt the DVD (new DVD) before installation.
Meanwhile, I tried downloading another RHEL5 server DVD on the internet and am going to try with this as well. Also, am downloading 5 different CDs for the RHEL5 and try with this as well.
Now that you have got to know about the "unavailable disk space" not the real problem, kindly let me know as to what else could have raised this issue.
Thanks,
Achyutha

[Rubberman]

The problem is that you already have 4 primary partitions on the disc. This is the limit of the DOS boot sector. One of those can be an extended partition, which in turn can have up to (I think) 63 sub-partitions. If you can backup the F: drive partition, create an extended one using that and the remaining space, then you can recreate the F: drive ntfs volume as an extended partition, and install Linux on the remaining space using the extended partition table for that.