Laptop is a Flexnote 5300c, 4gb hd, 32mb of RAM and 4000MHz celeron with MMX CPU.

I have a two questions firstly I have tried vector on this and didnt like it. So how do I go about formatting my hard drive.

Secondly I have tried Vector and Cobind linux is there any other distros you would recommend for this?

Thanks in advance
Nic

Question 1.) If you're wanting to wipe the drive you need a disk to boot off of (like a cd or floppy). However, if you're going to install another distro onto the laptop its easiest just to leave it to the installer.

Question 2.) It all depends on what you want from you distro. If you're wanting to learn, or already quite competent and like command lining it, then try slackware or arch. Otherwise, try Fedora Core or SUSE. I personally don't like Debian and Gentoo will be a pain on that laptop due to needing to compile loads of packages.

Hope that helps

Alex

Hi thanks again for the advice but i'm curious where i can get a boot disk from (or how to make one). I'm a complete n00b to linux and was curious how much disc space these distros take up.

well the amount of disk space a distro uses depends on what you install. A full install of slack (all the packages on the disc) is approximately 2 gigs.

Well any linux distro can usually be used for a boot disk. Or you can try a 'live' cd which is a linux install on a cd which will boot and give you a full blown system, running from the disc. This can let you wipe the drive. I personally would just let a distro's install wipe the drive for you. You could then just remove the install disk once its finished.

HTH

Alex