dual booting.

[postmanpat16940]

Hello everyone,

This question has probably been asked many times, my apologies for asking again. I have just been given a brand new medion 96850 laptop with Vista home Premium already installed (ugh!!) I would like to install Suse 11.0 asap as a dual booting system, my hard drive is 250 gig. Would some kind person please advise me how to do this? preferably not too techie. Thank you all very much.

[N5SBP]

Do you have a SuSE DVD or a LIVE CD?
Do you think your laptop will boot off a DVD or CD if you insert one? (this is a BIOS option issue)
Do you know if all 250 gig is already allocated or is there space above the windows for SuSE?
What partitioning software are you comfortable with (Window disk mgr, partition magic, DOS FDISK, Linux PARTED)?
Could you reinstall the Windows if you lost it (IE: have reinstall disks etc).
Do you have or could get a spare HD that would slip into the laptop bay?

[valemon]

Download parted magic or gparted. These are live cds for partitioning. I usually create a small primary partition for swap (around 512-1024mb), and 2 extended for home and /root (root should me more than 10gig, home is your choice). You can also use suse's partitioning tool. Make sure that boot from cd/dvd is enabled from your bios. If you got any further questions or problems post back.

[postmanpat16940]

thank you, this is just what I needed

[postmanpat16940]

sorry to have been so long replying. Thanks for your help.