I am having problems installing Suse 9.0 onto my hardrive, I can't resize my NTFS. Has anyone done it succefully.
thanks
Dan
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You need to change your harddisk partioning using something like partition magic.

The basic idea with linux is that the boot sector for linux needs to be before cylinder 1024 on your harddrive or it won't boot.

Cylinder 1024 occurs at around 8 gigabytes, at least on my system, your results may vary. This means that you have to shrink your main, I assume c: partition to less than 8 gigabytes, you can see in partition magic where that 1024 cylinder is, it's got an arrow tha shows you, so say you shrink c: to 6 gig, which is plenty for the OS and programs. Then you need to create a small 100 mB partition after c:, that needs to be a primary partition, not a logical partition (be careful with that, partition magic defaults to logical, not primary, partitions)

A logical partition is contained in a primary partition, there can be a total of 4 primary partitions on each harddrive, so in this case you will have primary partition 1 = your c: drive; primary partition 2 = the linux boot partition, make it small. Then you can make the third primary partition be an extended partition, which means it can contain as many logical partitions as you want, you will be placing linux in several of those, let SUSE install itself though, if you want to keep it simple, just use the boot partition and then put all the rest in another partition, a logical one, but real linux geeks tend to use several partitions, but dont' do that til you understand unix partitioning.

The boot partition is not the main partition, keep this in mind, but it is the partition where just the bootfiles live, it only needs to be about 100 mB large, or smaller.

So you need to repartition your harddrive with at least this root partition available for linux to use, this can be a problem if you have too much data on your c drive, so in this case it would pay to make another partition for your data, this is also helpful so llnux can share data with your windows, SUSE finally supports reading ntfs, and writing, from what I understand, this is new but works I believe..[/code]
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When resizing your hard drive partitions, be very careful with programs like Partition Magic. Don't try to do many things at once, resize the primary c: partition first, then click the green circle on partition magic, that will force the computer to reboot, since that's the active main drive partition, it will resize it on reboot, before windows actually starts up. once you have the main partition sized, you can go on to creating the rest of the partitions.

Linux installers usually are pretty good about creating the partitions you need, what I would recommend is that you first resize your c: partition, reboot, the go ahead and leave about 10 gig empty on your harddrive, no partition, with the space beginning at around 6 gig, so leave 6 gig to 14-16 gig empty, linux will use this for its own partitions, then at the end of your harddrive, in the remaining space, create another partition, ntfs, using the rest of the space on your harddrive, this will be your shared data drive, for both windows and linux.

This is also assuming you don't want to run any other copies of windows on your machine, if you do, you should make one more partition and leave that for another windows installation, you need about 3 gig minimum, well 2 gig is absolute minimum, to really use windows for anything practical.

Let us know how this goes for you.
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