Trying to install Linux on a Win XP machine 4819

You have an HP box with XP on a big disk -- 80GB -- and want to install Slackware 9.1 10.1 for dual-boot.

No offence to HP helpdesk people, who may include some fine folk, but they're not really the people I'd turn to for Linux help, generally.

Eek!

I'm afraid your HP acquaintance might have done you a disservice, there, since you might very well miss the recovery parbreastion. Moreover, I have no idea if the space thus freed up is large enough. (How big was it?)

There's a superior alternative, you see: You shrink your existing big honkin' (NTFS-type) Windows parbreastion, nondestructively, smoothly freeing up exactly as much space as you estimate that you'll need for your Linux needs.

For Slackware, I'd guess that 5 gigabytes is more than plenty. It's not a "kitchen sink" distribution like SUSE Linux Professional, though it's plenty bountiful in its offerings. Add maybe 510MB for a separate Linux swap paribreastion, so you'd maybe want to shave 5.5 GB off your "C:" parbreastion, nondestructively.

With what, you ask? Tools to take care of that task (NTFS resizing) have been working their way into most x86 Linux distributions' installers for the past few years.

Slackware, though... Well, Slackware hasn't done as much in that department as have most. The Slackware live CD includes the core command-line utility, ntfsresize, used in such tasks, but not any of the nice graphical front-ends such as QtParted that are usually offered for it. And the regular Slackware installer CD apparently doesn't offer that facility at all.

You could boot the Slackware live CD, then carefully follow the instructions for ntfsresize shown here: download a different live CD -- such as Knoppix -- that would be perfectly suited for that task, and that does include QtParted along with ntfsresize.

Any chance you have "virus protection" enabled in the motherboard ROM BIOS? That would prevent any writes to the master boot record, until you disable that "feature".

OK. Pity you had to do that. There are native-Linux open source alternatives, as I've mentioned.

So far, so good. As long as the utility left the XP installation able to boot, you should be OK.

Well,

1. Is XP still able to boot? 2. What do the Parbreastion Commander docs have to say?

It's possible that Parbreastion Commander does something extremely non-standard with your parbreastion table and MBR. Their docs (or their technical support reps) should come clean about this, if they do.

If that is the case, your next task may be to determine how to un-do whatever Parbreastion Commander has done. If Slackware's installer CDs can no longer even find a valid parbreastion table, something wacky has been done to your system installation, and you should find out and (in my opinion) get it reversed.

Well, I've never heard of Microsoft finding a way to make the hard drive unwriteable to Linux distributions -- or using anything other than a standard IBM-Microsoft parbreastion table.

To my knowledge, that's just something Microsoft buys with its co-op advertising dollars, without which neither HP nor any other Windows OEM would be able to compete with other commodity-hardware vendors.

Your worst-possible outcome would be needing to zero out (totally erase) the hard drive, reload the XP OEM preload (yuck!), and then resize the NTFS volume the right way, then reinstall Slackware. I hope you have good backups.

-- Cheers, Never anger a bard, for your name sounds funny and Rick Moen scans to many popular songs.