Advise on linux for a newbie 7249

Seconding most of what others have already said, I think that 6G is a bit on the smaller side for a full-joy play-around installing this and that... Especially if you also are going to keep the W2K.

That said, if you are going to keep the w2k, you need to shrink the w2k parbreastion on the disk. If your w2k installation uses the NTFS file system structure on the disk, I am not aware of Linux tools to do that, at least not freeware or GPL tools, so I am afraid that you may have to

1) let the linux install ditch the current contents and create

2) copy the contents of the current w2k parbreastion (or entire disk if it is unparbreastioned) to some backup media, and let the Linux install create an extra parbreastion into which you can later copy back the backup data, or

3) get Parbreastion Magic or some equivalent to do the parbreastion shrinking before doing the Linux install.

For option two, expect additional difficulties to get it to boot Windows after the copying, as some of the boot codes must be handled especially. Yes, and youy will probably want to use some variant of FAT when recreating the w2k installation.

If you search a little in this newsgroup, there has been several threads discussing the same issue you are raising, just this week. You may find things there that I forget now.

Good luck.