Ok. So i guess some of you read my post about recovering my windows partition. Well I could not get that working, so i Formated.

I have re-installed windows XP. and again am planning on installing SUSE 9.1 alongside it.

When i try to partition my hdd using the suse YaST tool, it wants to devide my HDD by half. 60 gigs for windows, and 60 gigs for linux. i dont wanna give linux that much. i wanna give linux only 10 gigs, and 110 for windows. But when i try to partition my NTFS HDD, it tells me that it cannot resize a mounted partition.

I'm too scared to do it via FDisk as i've had a bad experience with this.
Will partition magic be able to do this?

Else please help with this whole partitioning.

regards,
Mo

When you installed XP did you tell the setup to only allocate 110 GB of the drive (Drive C:) to be used for the main OS? When you install SUSE 9.1 then tell it to use the remaining 10 GB (Drive D:).

That should work. I think

i tried doing that too.
But can't remember now why it did not work.
I should still be able to partition it should i not?

And another thing : After the first attempt, when i had to reformat my HDD, my drive has become very noisy. you can hear it reading now. what may have caused this?

its annoying cause i know it never used to be there.

But i'll try to split the partition first.

thanx

Usually what I do is reduce the size of the partition on the disk I want to use by 10 or 15 GB. Then use the Linux distro's formatting procedure to use the "free space" and allow it to make the 2 or 3 Linux paritions it wants to make. That way I don't muck with the NTFS partition and never have any trouble. Still got Xandros 2.0 lurking on my harddrive as a dual boot possiblity. Still wish to use it more, but there is just tooooo much exciting Windows software out there! :)

difficult to imagine the new noise has anything to do with reformatting.

I don't know about the partitioning of your drve, but if it is making a funny sound, I would immediately backup whatever you need as your hard drive might be about to fail. I had a hard drive [physical] failure about 4 months ago and before it stopped working, I had noticed it making some funny noises....then nothing...it stopped working completely. The bios would not recognize it and it was dead...all gone. I could have had it all recovered for like $1,300.00 but I just took the loss and got a new drive. I had most of the stuff backed up anyway.

Just a tip...it might save you some time if you are gonna have two OS's you might as well have 2 hard drives...in case one dies. :)