It Installs, But...

[emorrp1]

yes, my first thought is that you've been sharing /home among multiple distros, which has to be done very carefully. Basically, different distros use different versions of software which may use conflicting configurations in /home, one way to get around it is to use a different username per distro e.g. emorrp1-felicia, emorrp1-suse etc. The best way I've found is to have a separate "data" partition with the folders like Documents, Videos, Pictures etc. in it. You can create "symlinks" in linux so that you can make these folders appear under your /home as if you had all the files locally. That way the /home partition only has config files (currently c. 500MB in my install) which you can then keep separate per distribution, while still having fully functioning access to all your data (you can even forego the stage of a separate /home partition then, since you wouldn't mind so much if you lost it all).

As to how exactly you went about doing this, it depends on your exact hard drive setup (which partitions are where, how full they are etc.) and ultimately do you have enough empty space for a new partition with a complete copy of your data files. If you don't, you can get around the issue by transferring incrementally, then almagamating afterwards. If you need a more complete guide, let me know your hard drive config. After you've separated data from configuration files, you can safely reformat /home (or, as I pointed out earlier, include it in /)

[emorrp1]

ok, so what you probably want is the following initially:

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sudo mount /dev/sda11 /media/data

This will let you mount the disk as a one off, to make it permanent you have to add a line to the end of one of the files it's looking for: /etc/fstab (using root)

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/dev/sda11 /media/data ext3 relatime,exec 0 2

The syntax is drive mountpoint filesystem options backup fsck-order.

Drive should ideally be a UUID (as the rest of the mounts in that file are) to always correctly detect it, as the drives are supposedly not guaranteed to always be the same /dev, but I've never had any problems with using drive letters, and I can't remember how to get the UUID. The other related problem you might come across is that UUID changes on a change of formatting or size of partition, so the existing lines in /etc/fstab **may** not correctly detect any of the partitions you altered. If this happens, you'll need to subsitute the UUID part with the /dev part above it, bearing in mind you might be booted into a recovery text-only mode if something goes wrong, so for peace of mind I'd do this before you reboot, just to be sure. The backup (0) you might think you want to change, but in reality this portion is all but obsolete, very few backup managers use it.

In terms of labelling, there's not much point as your mount point will define the difference, but there is a tool "e2label" used to label ext3 partitions (not installed by default). I'd recommend relabelling the Windows data partition from within windows, though I'm sure there would be a way to do it in linux if you looked hard enough.

[emorrp1]

Ok, hope this helps, let me know if it doesn't work:

1) delete the Documents folder in the home partition
2) navigate to the directory containing the real Documents folder in the data partition
3) right click on Documents, select "Make Link"
4) holding down shift, drag and drop the new "Link to Documents" to your home directory
5) rename to "Documents" and enjoy

the equivalent commands in the terminal:

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rm -rf ~/Documents
ln -s /path/to/real/Documents ~

[emorrp1]

nope, don't worry, nothings wrong. I believe the ext3 filesystem reserves a certain percentage of disk-space for root usage, which I'm pretty sure is what's showing up as the 200MB. Just treat the partition as empty, and you'll be fine.

[emorrp1]

hmm, if you formatted the partition after transfering the files, that could overwrite them. Other than that, I'm stumped, sorry.