Dual Intallation

[TBerndt67]

Greetings! I'm sure this question has been previously posted and probably answered; however, I am preparing to install Mint 4.0 on a separate partion on my Vista machine. I have a Dell E1505, 1.73 ghz processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB harddrive with 21 GB freed up for the mint install. Currently the free space is "unallocated." Is there any formating that I need to do to the hard drive space before I attempt the install or will Mint 4.0 take care of the formating? I'm looking forward to getting some insight with this issue along with any tips or tricks that will make my install go smoothly. Also, I'm a newbie to Linux and this is my first disto. Thanks!

TB

[Husse]

You don't need to format, and from Vista you can't as Vista does not recognize a Linux file system
What you should do is consider the partitioning scheme, I recommend between 7 and 10 GB for root one GB for swap and the rest for home, read more here
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... _partition
When you install you have to choose manual partitioning.
If you do it thinking about what you do you should be fine, but it is different from Windows

[tberndt67]

Thanks for the tip and info! I'll read it over tonight before I attempt my first installation. Messing with the harddrive can be quite unnerving. I assume that I can access Gparted from the live cd?

[Husse]

Answer yes and it's also part of the install procedure