Mint 8 - partitions

[castan]

Good afternoon,

I recently installed Mint 8 in dual boot a from Windows XP using Unetbootin (my computer is a Dell inspiron and has no CD player)... and I could no go beyond the "Partitions menu" with the following message :

Your installation medium is on dev(slash)sda2. You will not be able to create, delete or resize partitions on this disk, but you may be able to install to existing partions there.

sda1 (fat16) 39.2 MB (yellow square)
sda2 (ntfs) 140.06 GB (pink square)

(slash) dev (slash) sda
(slash) dev (slash) sda1 fat 16
(slash) dev (slash) sda2 ntfs

I am a real beginner. What should I do to install mint 8 from this stage (step by step) ?

Thanks in advance
Castan

[beefstu]

Your installation medium is on dev(slash)sda2. You will not be able to create, delete or resize partitions on this disk

This sounds like you're trying to install mint on the same place that you have the installation files.

what do you mean by

from Windows XP?

as in using mint4win (not in mint ?

Is this what you are trying to achieve:
You have XP installed on the whole disk, you want to dual boot Mint and XP?

If so, its probably best to resize the partitions from within XP to free up the amount of space you want to give Mint. When you then try to install Mint, on the partitions menu, you should be able to then just choose to install in the largest continuous free space.

Just a note, is there any reason you are using Mint 8 instead of 9?

[StanTheMan]

Your partition list shows a 'fat16' partition at sda1.
This reminds me of a setup used in Partition Magic to create a small boot partition for Windows.
If this is 'Boot Magic' you should try to get rid of this. It would conflict with a Linukx bootloader system.
Win XP should be on sda1 (which would then be Windows C:drive) and would fit in with the Linux grub bootloader process.