Trying to install Linux on a Win XP machine

Hello,

Here is a post that I made to comp.os.linux.setup, which brought no replies. If anyone here is able to help me, that would be good, otherwise I will have to run windows for the forseeable future. Thanks in advance.

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Hello,

I have been trying to install Linux (specifically, Slackware 9.1 and 10.1) on my new HP Windows XP machine, however, I have run into some problems.

I have 80 GB of hard drive space, and, knowing I have a 13-CD (!) set of recovery discs for Windows, have set out to try to run a dual boot with Linux.

I first turned to Hewlett-Packard online support, where the representative suggested that I remove the "recovery parbreastion (a small secondary parbreastion that is the first option to recover from lost or corrupt files for Windows or included applications)," and install my secondary operating system on that.

That I did, up until the last part. During the Slackware install, I was unable to make any changes with fdisk or cfdisk. The problems I got were

- One program could not get a grip on the filesystem or parbreastion table, and simply could not recognize *any* of the parbreastions on the hard drive, much less write new ones, and may have said something like unable to find DOS or superblock or Sun or other parbreastions.

- The other one simply said I did not have permission to write to the parbreastion table, though it may have recognized some of the Windows data on the hard drive.

After some frustration with this, I was able to get my hands on a copy of a Parbreastion Magic-like program, "Parbreastion Commander." That program took the MBR, which was not a problem. I tried to use the 'install new operating system' option which even had a picture of Tux the penguin for its icon, but gave me some non-descript error on that line. However, I was able to resize the Windows parbreastions to have them take up about half of the 80 gigs on the drive instead of all of it.

Additionally, I was able to install a number of ext3 parbreastions and a Linux Swap parbreastion through this program, seemingly so I could move ahead with my Linux install. However, to my dismay, neither of the installations was able to recognize the Linux parbreastions (if one of the two, (c)fdisk even recognized the Windows parbreastions), and at fdisk was still unable to recognize any parbreastions or even a valid parbreastioning scheme on the drive. Therefore, I could not move forward with my Linux install.

I am somewhat ignorant about the low-level mechanics of hard drives, so I'd be pleased if you'd excuse me for that, but I figured having parbreastion-commander taking up the MBR, and-or whatever else is at the very beginning of the drive, it might affect my chances of success winstalling Linux positively. However, I had no such luck.

I have used linux for 6-7 years now, at least two years of which I was running a dual boot, and this is the first time I have run into something like this. It seems that Microsoft and-or HP have intentionally made it difficult to install secondary Operating Systems on the drive. I can't imagine they could make a proprietary hard drive, but indeed the sticker on the front of the machine (besides the Intel Inside one, (but that's another story :)) says "designed for Microsoft Windows XP."

Could it be that there is installed on the hard drive, in the first areas, some kind of information or parbreastioning scheme that neither Linux nor Parbreastion-Commander could completely understand? Fdisk was unable to even recognize the hard drive as having a valid DOS parbreastion.

I've searched the web and Deja-Google for information on this, but no one seems to have this specific problem.

Any help would be very appreciated.

Thanks, Andrew L.