Ok ive searched this forum but i havent found any help really. Ive got an 89Gig HD and im trying to install windows 98se and fedora 1. ive installed 98se and left the space i want linux on unpartitioned. When i go through the install process and i get to partitioning i told it to automaticly partition using existing free space. it told me it was unable to allocate disk space. then i tried disk druid and it will let me create 2 partitions but if i try another on i get the same errorl. ive got a 15Gig partition that i installed windows on and then another 25 gig one formatted in fat32 for storage space and i left the other 40 unpartitioned. are my fat partitions too big for windows 98? can anyoen tell me whats going on

You probably don't understand what you are seeing with Disk Druid.

# Freeware partitioning software
Look for fips20 on your install CD
Ranish Partition Manager
Tom's Root and Boot Floppy has Linux fdisk
Proper Filesystem Layout

# Pre-installation guides
GNU/Linux pre-installation checklist
The Pre-Installation Help File

# Partitioning
Linux Partition HOWTO
Rute - Partitions, File Systems, Formatting, Mounting
Proper Filesystem Layout

what do you mean? why wont it automatically partition it

Because you are trying to co-exist with another non-cooperating OS, namely Microsoft's, you have to tell the Linux install how you want to do the partitioning. Once you can find your empty 40 gig space (are you sure it is there and isn't partitioned??) and tell the install where it is, it can do the necessary partitions for Linux automatically (I don't recomend their automatic partitioning) if you wish.

ive installed dual boots tons of times using xp and i never had any problems doing it this way. is the windows partition too big for 98?

I don't think so as Win98SE has support for large drives. Of course, I never give more than 10 gigs to Windows, myself as I need it for real work in Linux.

The first step is knowing exactly what your partitioning is (Microsoft can do wierd things).

If you can boot to a linux prompt, post the output of this command and I can give better instructions. I recommend having a few linux "live" CDs (runs from the CD) handy so you can easily tell how your system is setup.

fdisk -l

That should return a list of all your hard drive partitions.

# Cheap CDs
AlmostFreeLinux
Discount Linux CDs
Linux Central
Cheapbytes
TuxCDs
ComputerHelperGuy
CheapISO
Os Heaven