Hi, I have a sony laptop with windows-XP installation. I would like to partition it for installing linux as well. Looks like the fdisk.exe for dos does not work on this. Can some one please tell me how to proceed i.e where can I find fdisk.exe for XP? santosh

You can do it by rebooting with a startup or emergency floppy disk. Mine has fdisk on it along with format and other DOS utilities. You can either have the utilities on your startup disk or on a separate floppy to use after you boot up with the startup disk. From there, you just go ahead and fdisk and/or format as usual. You will lose all your data when you do this so have at least one good backup of everything that is important to you. A fast and easy way to reinstall everything after such an operation is with Nortons Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image. It used to take me 15-16 hours to reinstall everything on my computer after crashes or other actions and that has been reduced to less than an hour including Windows reinstallation with Ghost. I prefer using Partition Magic Version 7.0 (previous versions not compatable with XP) because it is much easier and you do not lose data. It is well worth the cost and it can be run in XP although once you have selected all the actions that you want to perform (partitioning, formatting etc.) it reboots and does it's final work outside XP. So far, I have never had a problem and have used it 5-10 times to repartition drives.

indead, fdisk will destroy your data. Use Partition magic! it can resize your primary partition, even if it's ntfs. After resizing, make a linux swap partition about 2X the amount of ram, the rest Linux EXT2. Then boot with a linux install-cd and it will detect the partitions. You'll probably have to set "/" as the mountpoint for the linux-partition (/dev/hda5 is the swap and /dev/hda6 is the ext2partition if you have 1 drive and only 1 primary partition for windows and no other partition.) Johan