First, if you have XP installed on your main harddrive, you do have a partition there, it's just taking up the whole hard drive and being used by XP. I hate to get picky with the terminalogy, but if you don't understand that, then my help will be worthless.

Ok, on another harddrive, you must make sure you have enough empty, UNPARTITIONED space. That is the key word, UNPARTITIONED. If you have space on the drive according to XP, but the entire hard drive is one big partition already in use, then you have a problem. Either completely deletet that partition, remake it but smalled, leaving space for the Linux partition; or get PartitionMagic and use that.

Ok, now that we have some room on a hard drive, you have to have the '/', '/usr', and '/home' mount points. You also need to create a Swap Partition. Think of it as the page file under Windows. If you have a lot of RAM, >=256, you can probably get away with making the Swap pretty small, say around 64 Megs.

Once you have those mount points and Swap partition, you should be able to continue normally. Hope that helps. Please feel free to through fruit at me if it doesn't work.

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10 PRINT "HOME"
20 PRINT "SWEET"
30 GOTO 10

May my head's not absorbing it at the moment, but this is my problem.

When I'm setting up "mount points" it says they're all invalid w/ various errors. Am I supposed to make a partition whose name is /usr or something?

the main mount points (/, /usr, /home) have to be on a linux native partition. so if you have XP on a NTFS drive with no partitions, you can't do it.

quote:

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Originally posted by CatKnight:
the main mount points (/, /usr, /home) have to be on a linux native partition. so if you have XP on a NTFS drive with no partitions, you can't do it.

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When 1337 hax0rs start impaling each other with swords and typing code with a hook on one hand, then they can modify the term "pirate."

when you get to the screen where u select the mount points, you can also manipulate your partitions there as well. so here's what you do... select the partition that you want to squilsh, and choose delete. it will probably ask if you are sure. say yes. then, click on Add, choose Linux Swap as the partition type, and set its size to 128mb (cos linux can only handle max 128mb swaps afaik. if you want more swap space i believe you have to create more swap partitions). so anyways, you still have lots of unpartitioned space and no linux partition. click add again, choose partition type to be linux native, either enter a size or tell it to grow to fill the free space or something. it should then allocate all the free space to the linux partition. then you have to set your mount points. you *have* to have a / mount point (root mount point) cos everything in linux appears as a sub-directory of the / directory. so set the mount point of your new linux partition to be / - don't worry about /home and /usr and stuff for now - unless you're going to upgrading soon (like you said) and plan on saving all the stuff you have in /home and /usr, in which case you create separate linux native partitions and mount them as /home and /usr. if you want, you can also specify a mount point for your xp partition and the other backup partition so you can see them under linux (may have to recompile your kernel to get ntfs support tho). when it asks which partitions to format, choose to format all the partitions you created, but don't format /home and /usr in subsequent installations/upgrades.
next issue is lilo. don't install lilo to the hard drive/partition that has xp on it. if it's anything like installing lilo with win2k, it will fuck up. so you'd rather install lilo to the mbr of your second hard drive (not xp's boot drive) and change your bios boot device to boot from the second hard drive whenever you want to use linux. or you can experiment with boot.ini to try and get it to boot linux from the xp bootloader (which i haven't seen yet, since i don't have xp yet, so i may be talking out of my ass here). i do know that it totally stuffed up my win2k when i tried to install lilo to my win2k drive, so you'd be a bit safer leaving xp with its own bootloader. or maybe you can set up lilo to boot to xp and then use lilo as your boot manager instead. either way, if you get that to work let me know, cos i can't figure out how to get the two to dual boot properly. i'd also advise you to make a boot disk just in case
hope it helps. just remember that i am typing this off the top of my head, last time i did a linux installation was weeks ago, and that was 7.1 not 6.1 so i may have made a few mistakes. please don't kill me if it doesn't work