installation

after a joyous year of not being able to partition my hard drive, and nobody being able to help, i have finally done it. my hdd is now in 2 parts. hoorah. new problem now. installing linux. i have downloaded debian but it is corrupt or something. i am now downloading fedora. my question is, how do i install while guaranteeing that my windows os stays intact? do i select my 2nd partition as the active partition before booting the installation cd? will it give me the option of where to install? im a little nervous as i do not have enough space left on my hard drive for a backup image. i have roxio goback but its a bit crap. anyone? i know you will read this shiva. did your suse installation ask you where you wanted to install linux?

come on. surely at least one person on a linux forum has installed linux before

Yep, Fedora (assume this is Fed4?) will give you a nice GUI to ask where you want to install, it will even auto-allocate your free space to the required Linux partitions
/
/boot
swap
(review it before accepting)

or you can do it manually to add
/home
/usr

The GUI clearly shows your existing Windows partition so there should be no danger of encroaching on it.

Do your homework before you start your install. The major problem you could encounter is with the boot loader(LiLo or Grub) not "seeing" your Windows partition. Here's a couple of links concerning that problem;

http://www.redhat.com/support/resour...ootloader.html

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

I wouls suggest doing a complet backup before you start...

Geez, it's pretty simple.
Here it is in technicolour...
The OFFICIAL Fedora Core 4 install guide

Particularly Chapter 6
Tick the box that says "Keep all partitions and use only existing free space"


jmtjet is right to warn about the bootloader issues. Especially as you are running XP.
That is covered in Chapter 7

Happy reading and welcome to Linux!

ok. i made my partition. the fedora dvd boots ok but it wont recognise the installation image or something. i downloaded the i386 dvd iso. i dont even know what i386 is and have no idea if thats the one i need. help please

Have you checked the file size? Even 1 bit out and it could (and usually does) screw up the whole image. Worst comes to worse, re-download the image. i386 is the architecture, that is probably the one you want :)

Oh yes, check the md5 sum if you want to verify you have a good image