Need help installing SUSE 9.1 w/xp dual boot

[antgross@pacbell.net]

I have a single partition hard drive. I want to dual boot suse 9.1 with xp. I boot from the SUSE installation disk and gives me the following info at the partition screen:
Choose partition that can be erased to make room for (? sorry i cant read my own handwriting for this part)

.Use entire disk
1. Box to check 57 gb hpfs/ntfs(/del/hda(?)
2. Box to check 8.3 mb

I try choosing the box 1 or 2 option and it says something about needing the bigger partition.

I don't want to select use entire disk cause I'm afraid it will delete XP.

Please advise.

thanks

[Rugpriest]

Erm - with your current situation you may have probs. To get Linux on there you're going to need to repartition the drive but its all taken up with XP. There are some programs that can do this without disrupting the original OS but I have heard that they are unreliable. If I was in your situation (and I was recently) I would reformat entirely and then partition the drive, half for XP and half for SUSE. Alternatively you could get a cheap 2nd hard drive to put SUSE onto.

btw the 57gb partition is your xp partition. The 8.3 Mb one is something to do with keeping track of other partitions on the disk (dont know exactly), anyway its nothing to do with any OS and cant be written to.

[antgross@pacbell.net]

Thanks.

I got partition magic and that knew exactly how to partition for Linux OS and it came out fine.

[Karnevil9]

You did what I would have suggested. I have had no problems using parition magic to partitiion my hard drives in order to install Linux.

[kilgoretrout]

Shrink your winxp partition with PM and leave the reclaimed space unallocated, i.e. not partitioned. You should have an option to install suse on the free or unallocated space. Suse should partition and format the unallocated space for you.
The suse installer does not have the ability to resize an ntfs partition. Mandrake does if you want to try that. However, I agree with the above comments. Resizing a partition is the most risky operation performed by partitioning utilities. PM is your safest bet and at that I would back up any important data beforehand. All partitioning utilities warn you to do so for a reason; stuff happens, not very often if it's a good utility but it does happen.