I have a new HP laptop with WinXP running on an 80 gig harddisk. I purchased it with the intent of dual booting Linux, since I had done this with my last HP latop.

Weirdly, I cannot repartition the NTFS partition. I have defragmented the drive (a few times) and attempted to repartition immediately after defragmenting.

I have tried with Partition Magic 8.0 and with Mandrake 9.2. Both partition programs report "too many errors" and refuse to complete the repartition.

Does anyone have a similar experience? I probably can kill the WinXP install and fdisk the partition, but that is a whole lot more work than I had intended to get into.

Presumably if there were actually partition "errors" existing, the defragment process would find them. I wonder if Microsoft has found a way to "spike" NTFS so it won't resize, in order to discourage easy setup of dual boot machines.

Does anyone know of a process that will find and correct the alleged partition errors?

Thanks.

Having solved this problem, I will post the answer. Apparently, "something" in my windows system causes "errors". So, if I run chkdsk from Windows, errors are reported. If I run chkdsk /F to fix them (which runs at start up) it reports that they are corrected -- though when I again run chkdsk in Windows, errors are reported.

The solution was to run chkdsk /F -- which runs at startup and before windows -- and then turn the computer off and reboot with the Mandrake 9.2 install CD.

So, now I have a functional Mandrake 9.2 install. However, there are some problems, one which concerns me a lot because it was a problem on my last HP Laptop. On that laptop I was running Mandrake 9.1 (worked fine) until I wanted to get a wireless card running.

When I enabled the wireless drivers, I began to have a problem whereby the init scripts would get corrupted somewhat randomly. I ultimately changed to SuSE 8.1 and then 8.2 which worked fine.

Mandrake 9.2 recognized, but did not install drivers for, my 802.11g card. However, I have noticed that somewhat randomly, the login screen gets trashed -- the shutdown option disappears, the "picture" for the login name changes, etc.

So, I seem to have the same problem I had with 9.1 -- which ultimately wiped out my whole install.

I guess I will be switching again to SuSE. (Don't like this, because I only know how to compile the kernel in the Mandrake install).

(Just random notes, fwiw.)